Customer Reviews

Wacky Wednesday (Beginner Books(R))

5 star:		(24)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This book deserves more than five stars and is one of the best beginning readers ever created!

Wacky Wednesday combines the interesting repetition of a beginning reader with a fun set of picture puzzles. The two features are wonderful together for encouraging careful observation (useful in life, as well as in word recognition).

As a result of this brilliant book concept, Theodore Geisel (a k a Theo. Le Sieg -- Geisel backwards, and Dr. Seuss) have teamed up with New Yorker cartoonist, George Booth, to create a fun classic that will be enjoyed by parents and children for many generations to come.

Imagine a day that begins when you look up in bed over your head, and see something funny:

"It all began with that shoe on the wall.

A shoe on the wall . . . ?

Shouldn't be there at all!"

A child wakes up one morning to finds increasing numbers of unusual objects in rather odd places. Pretty soon, the objects even begin start to split apart. "And I said, 'Oh, MAN!' And that's how Wacky Wednesday began."

The child looks out the window and sees a bunch of bananas growing in a normal tree and water running through a garden hose with a long section missing in it. Out in the hall, a candy cane holds up a part of a hall table, one door has two knobs, and a picture is upside down. In the bathroom, the child wears one sock while showering, there's a palm tree in the toilet, one faucet is upside down, and a fish is swimming happily in the shampoo bottle.

In the bedroom while dressing, four things are wrong (including more misplaced shoes). In the kitchen, this grows to five. On the way to school, there are six. Later, down the street, there are seven. Outside the school are eight. In the classroom, there are nine.

That's when cognitive dissonance sets in. The teacher says, "Nothing is wacky here in my class! Get out! You're the wacky one! OUT!"

Outside the school now, there are ten new wacky things. Down the street, eleven more . . . then another twelve.

"I ran and knocked over Patrolman McGann."

"'Don't be sorry,' he smiled. 'It's that kind of day. But be glad! Wacky Wednesday will soon go away!"

"Only twenty things more will be wacky."

"Just find them and then you can go back to bed."

And with that, "Wacky Wednesday was gone . . . and I even got rid of that shoe on the wall."

The pictures present lots of opportunities to help your child notice how things work. Water needs to go through something to come out the other end. You need a door at the end of steps to get into a house. Windows cannot stand by themselves in the middle of a lawn. People don't drive sitting in the back seat of a car. The beauty of this kind of picture juxtaposition is in the opportunity to have many conversations with your child to open up the beauty of how things fit together, and don't work so well when they don't fit.

As for the beginning reader aspect, the book has many one syllable words that rhyme. This provides the maximum ease for decoding the letters and turning them into words. I put in the examples of the rhymes here to make that point for you.

I thought that the ways the details in the pictures were jumbled were quite imaginative. The wacky elements are well distributed on a page, and seldom repeat the jokes. This makes it continually interesting to search for them.

Ultimately, the book is rewarding too for the idea the teacher expresses -- that the child is having a wacky day rather than that anything is really wrong. We all have days like that. Then, suddenly they are over. That is good psychological reassurance for your child. You should encourage that thought, as well.

After you finish enjoying the book, I suggest that you each try your hand at creating a two page layout with pictures and a simple rhyme. That will make you both appreciate the book more, and give you a fun experience together.

Enjoy finding what needs to be unwhacked!

Wacky Wednesday

Theo LeSieg

Reading Level 1.2 

Wacky Wednesday is a great book for younger children! I would really recommend it! The illustrations are wonderful, bright, funny and very cute! Wacky Wednesday is a very good book for finding and helping children to look for different objects. It is really quite fun trying to find the things that are wacky!!

Clearly Theodore Geisel used the name Dr. Seuss for all of his books where he did both the story and the art while he saved Theo. LeSieg for those where he only did the story and let somebody else do the art. In the case of "Wacky Wednesday" that would be George Booth. My working hypothesis is that when the story is essentially grounded in the real world and does not go spinning off into the wild imaginative realm of Dr. Seuss, then somebody else gets the honors. This makes sense because even when Dr. Seuss draws regular kids they do not look like regular kids any more than the Cat in the Hat looks like a regular cat.

"Wacky Wednesday" is actually a counting book, but it takes you a while to notice that because when it begins with a shoe on the wall that should not be there is is clear that young readers are supposed to spot all the wacky things in each picture. But then we notice that whereas there were only three or four wacky things to be found in each picture now there are five, six and eventually twenty wacky things to discover before Wacky Wednesday is over and done with (although I think there are more than twenty in that final picture, depending on how many times you count the suns).

But counting is just the added educational benefit, because primarily "Wacky Wednesday" is for kids who love to play "What's wrong with this picture?" The funny mistakes are fairly simple, but kids will enjoy finding them in these pictures where as more and more wacky things show up nobody seems to notice. Besides, the whole trick here is to get beginning readers to read a book all by themselves, which is the point of these Beginner Books.

This book is clever and interesting. It was a favorite of mine and my siblings when we were young. In this book, wacky things continue to happen as the day goes on. On this Wednesday one little boy is the only one who realizes that things are not as they should be. Wacky Wednesday is a book that i recommend anyone to read to a small child, they will truelly enjoy it.

This was my absolute favorite book growing up - we had a whole collection of Dr Seuss books, along with fairy tales, nursery rhymes, Leo Leonni - and Wacky Wednesday was my favorite. As an adult looking back, I believe this book - above all others - tuned into both my creative side and my analytical/detailed/detective side. My poor parents who hoped for a doctor - I graduated with a degree in English and cite Dr Suess as my main influence. I'm very happy to be have found this book again + buy it for my toddler today, who is also creative and analytical. Yes, you'll find more wacky things than said to be there, but this carries the book further out of the realm of your typical neat little story, and encourages people + kids to use their brains to always be looking further.

I now have Wacky Wednesday memorized because my 3-yr old son wants to read this book every night! I like the book because it gives him a chance to think about what is going on in the pictures and find what is "wacky" or out of place. I recommend this book to anyone with small children!

Wacky Wednesday
By Dr. Seuss

This book has been one of my family's all time favorites. When my children were young, they asked me to read it over and over, while they tried to spot all the wacky things. When they learned to read, they read this book again and again.

Whenever anything out of the ordinary happens in our family, we still say, "It must be Wacky Wednesday".

When my son became a father, this is the first book he bought for his son.

Children will love solving the mystery that is called "Wacky Wednesday".

Jill Ammon Vanderwood
Author: Through the Rug
Through The Rug: Follow That Dog (Through the Rug)

Great first book for those learning to read. Kept my son sitting still long enough to finish - he wanted to keep looking for all of the wacky things in the pictures. Another great Dr. Seuss staple!

This book is about a very Wacky Wednesday, where a kid wakes up and finds weird and different out side and in his room, so he went outside and asked some people what's wrong they said the only thing that is wrong is you, they said you have to find 20 things wrong and then he could go back to sleep.

The lesson in Wacky Wednesday is how to count, and to see what's wrong with the picture.

The age level for this book is 4-8.

I thought the book was very good.

My four-year-old could hardly talk, he was laughing so hard. This was a back-seat book on an 8-hour car trip over Christmas. I love to listen to the children laughing, so I am recommending it highly. I think the best part is when the older kids read it to the little ones and they all laugh. It's just silly Dr. Seuss, but it puts a lot of fun into reading, so I give it five stars.