A wonderful new addition to my treasure of books! What a wonderful invitation for our students to do what I just did: tell a story using those rhyming words using the pictures as clues for meaning and understanding. Those are the only words you will find in those three pages that tell that particular story. Now, go back and read the bold words I have just used to tell the story :stoops, hoops, scoops, oops. All of a sudden, oh no! Billy's basketball hits Milly's ice cream andoops! the ice cream is gone! Billy gets his basketball and starts playing hoops while Milly is enjoying her scoops of delicious ice cream. Billy is holding his basketball and Milly is just waiting crossed arms for the ice cream truck to get closer. For example: you see Billy & Milly sitting on the stoops of an apartment building. This is the kind of book where you are relying a lot in the pictures in order to understand the story. This is reason number one this book is a winner to me, the rhyming words used in this book share Billy & Milly very short stories.

Feldman and pictures by Tuesday Mourning is a great book to teaching rhyming words in content. Well, I found a great book at our wonderful Columbus Metropolitan Library to reinforce the teaching of rhyming words (did I ever mention how much I HEART this library, I would be lost without it!) Billy & Milly, Short & Silly by Eve B. Please do not misunderstand me, ELLs CAN learn and produce rhyming words, it just takes them more time, more practice, more repetition. Imagine when you are learning a new language to be asked to think of words that rhymes with a particular sound, you will have to have a pretty strong command of the target language in order to acquire such a high level of understanding and production. One of the hardest things to teach young ELLs is rhyming words. A wonderfully playful introduction to language, rhyme and storytelling. New readers will be able to visually move through the stories easily and will be encouraged to talk about the adventures and misadventures of these two friends after they read each rhyming set. Feldman’s choices of noun/verb combinations are not only clever but present a variety of amusing, imaginative and sensible scenarios. Billy plays “hoops” while Milly eats her “scoops” until Billy’s ball lands on Milly’s cone: “oops.” The four rhyming words are descriptive enough to emphasize action and reaction in a complete story, the main narrative thread of which depends on Mourning’s cartoon-style illustrations done in a mixed-media collage. For example, the first story features a round-spectacled Billy holding a basketball and Milly next door, each sitting on their respective “stoops” waiting for the ice-cream truck. *The short-story and picture-book forms are taken to a new level with these 13 very succinct vignettes told in double-page spreads using only three- or four-word rhymes formed with nouns and verbs.

Zip & Milly by Alex Valentine