There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed A Fly

Taback, Simmy

Taback, Simmy

Scholastic, 1997

Picture Book

K-3

Caldecott Honor

This book was the old American Folk poem. In the story there is an old woman and she begins swallowing all of these things. The first thing that she swallowed was a fly. Then she swallowed a spider, a bird, a cat, a dog, a cow, a horse and then she dies at the end. The moral of the story is to never swallow a horse. This book is a funny book and goes from very small creatures to very large ones. If the old lady would have never swallowed a horse, then she would have never died!

I thought that this was a really good book and i really enjoyed reading it because i had been hearing this story since i was a little girl, it is a classic. I noticed that there was repetition in this book like many books for younger children. This book kind of took me back to my youth and brought back memories of the stories that i loved. I really loved the illustrations in the book as well. It looks like the illustrator maybe colored with color pencil and then cut the pictures out and pasted them on bright colored sheets of paper. The illustrator used a lot of very bright colors. There was a hole cut out where you could see each animal in the old ladys stomach and it made the book really fun.

You could use this book to introduce folk poems in the classroom. Most children have heard this story and are familiar with it. Also this book also uses many different types of animals and compares them based on size, starting with smaller animals and going to larger animals. You could use this when teaching how to compare/contrast objects.