Hamish's Picture Book 3/8

Eats, Shoots Leaves

Why, commas really DO make a difference!

Written by Lynne Truss and Illustrated by Bonnie Timmons, Eats Shoots Leaves is a picture book that doesn't take the form of a conventional narrative. The books main objective is to educate the young reader about the use of 'commas' in a text. This is cleverly achieved by the author, where he writes two sentences that are worded exactly the same. The difference between these two sentences is where the author places the commas to change the meaning of each sentence. The illustrations accompanying each scene really helps students to distinguish the meaning changes between the two sentences.

While this picture book doesn't follow a conventional narrative structure, each of the two same sentences that are used do to some extent give the reader the Exposition of the scene, with the author choosing to use many action verbs to give his text to give the reader a more intriguing reading experience that makes each sense interesting to read and relate to the illustrations.

Eats, Shoots Leaves would be a good teacher resource in the lower year levels when focusing grammatical literacy component of English. Reading this book to the whole class in a Shared reading activity would be a good way to engage the students into a lesson on appropriate comma use.