Shark in the Park


Written by Nick Sharratt

For ages 3 to 6

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This book is best for:
  • rhyming
  • speech sounds - /k/ word-final position
  • possessive pronoun (his)
  • subjective pronoun (he)

Review

Timothy Pope is exploring the park with his brand new telescope. He looks up at the sky, he looks down at the ground, he looks left, and he looks right. All of a sudden he sees a big black fin. “There’s a shark in the park!” But is it really a shark? Or could it be something else? Children will love peeping through the round holes in the centre of every page and guessing what Timothy has spotted.

Shark in the Park is a humorous and engaging story that is great fun to read aloud due to the rhythmic and repetitive rhyming text. The illustrations are colourful and bold depicting exciting double-page scenes at the park (e.g. ducks in the pond, a girl on rollerskates, children playing soccer). These are great for helping children to practice describing the types of things we might see at a park. The repetitive text makes this book fantastic for targeting grammar goals, such as the male pronouns ‘he’ and ‘his’, as well as speech sound goals, such as /t/ word-final position (e.g. shark, park, look).

For further speech and language targets in Shark in the Park, see the list below.


Book Details

Narrative Structure: Action Sequence

Story Plot: Repetitive Tale

Themes:
  • animals
  • sharks
  • toys
  • places - park

Speech and Language Targets

Speech Sounds:
  • /k/ - shark, park, look, quack
  • /l/ - look, left, loudest, telescope, all
  • /sh/ - shark
  • /t/ - Timothy, toy, telescope, cat
  • voiced /th/ - the, there, that, this
  • unvoiced /th/ - Timothy, through
Grammar:
  • prepositions (up, down, left, right, around, through)
  • possessive pronouns (his)
  • subjective pronouns (he)
  • third person singular tense
Semantics:
  • matching
  • labelling
  • describing
  • predicting
Narrative:
  • sequencing
  • direct character speech
Rhyme & Sound Awareness:
  • rhyme
Book Info

Published by Random House Children's Publishers in 2009 (ISBN: 9780552549776)

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