Hey Pancakes

Title: "Hey Pancakes"

Author: Tamson Weston

Illustrated by: Stephen Gammell 

Ages: 4-8

Grade level: Pre-kindergarten-second

Hardcover: 32 pages 

Publisher: Harcourt Children's Books; 1 edition (August 1, 2003) 

Language: English 

ISBN-10: 0152165029

"Hey, Pancakes!" is a wonderful fun story about everyone's favorite breakfast-PANCAKES! Its time to take over the children so three children and their dog wake up in the morning and move themselves right into the kitchen where they sift, stir, whisk, and whir the pancakes mix. This morning breakfast is fun and messy to make. Before they know it there is a huge stack of pancakes on their plates ready to be eaten. What a great way to start out our morning with a wonderful stack of homemade pancakes. 

 This story is a fun and exciting story to read. The plot, setting, characters, and theme everyone can relate too. We all can remember a time we got up super early to make our favorite breakfast. What a mess that was, but the final product was one that everyone in the family was proud of. The characters in this story fit so well. You can see by the images that they just woke up and are ready for that great breakfast. This story is filled with literacy elements from rhyming words to describing words. Assonance, onomatopoeia, and puns are used through out the whole story. An example of assonance is "A speck of this a few of those, a flick of the wrist, and up it goes". An example of onomatopoeia are; sift, stir, whir, whisk, hiss there are a lot of words that make sounds though out the whole book. What a great way to make the book more fun to read! The last example is a pun which can be seen when they talk about pancakes.  The illustrations are so fun. Looking at them just make you want to get up and make pancakes that way to. Although in the story the images are so much more fun then any time I had ever made pancakes. The images do a great job of capturing the text and the text does a great way of imaging of what the images should look like. The mini-lesson I would do with this story is talk about how important it is to eat a healthy and filling breakfast. I would also want to use the recipe in the back of the book to make with my class. We could talk about breakfast and on a Friday have a fun filled breakfast eating day! Books like this one are fun to read in class and get children excited about reading and make reading fun!!