Sonya's Chickens by Phoebe Wahl
Published in 2015
Genre: children's, fiction, nature
What does the text say?
- Sonya is a young girl who is given three baby chicks by her father. She takes personal responsibility for raising and caring for these chicks. She calls herself their "mama" and her parents fix up a chicken coop in the backyard for the chicks.
- Sonya and her family live on a farm.
- Sonya has many responsibilities with the chickens, such as feeding them and cleaning the coop.
- Sonya wakes up one night to hear a loud commotion in the coop. She arrives and realizes that a fox has taken one of her chickens. She is devastated.
- Her father explains that the fox was not being mean; he was taking the chicken to his own family so that his children could be happy and be taken care of, just like Sonya with her chickens.
- Sonya and her family repair the broken coop and continue to care for the 2 chickens, who begin to lay eggs.
- THEMES: responsibilities and duties
How does the text work?
- The story is told in chronological order as a sequence of events.
- The text is more advanced, with about a paragraph of words per page.
- Vocabulary includes words like "rustling" "squawking" and "peeping" to describe the chicks
- Illustrations vibrantly show aspects of the text like the night sky, the woods, and the flowers
- Complete sentences are used, along with some dialogue.
What does the text mean?
- Can connect to science lessons (circle of life)
- Concepts beyond the text include being empathetic (putting yourself in the foxes shoes)
- Theme of caring for others can be applied to many lessons on prosocial behavior
Teaching Literacy Learning
- Vocabulary: Lots of words in this book deal specifically with chickens/animals/farming. They would be useful for creating a word wall or rewriting a farming story. The story provides good context for these new words, as well as good illustrations to give more meaning. Words include: pullets, coop, peeping, peck, forage, hens. Pages include 6-9.
- Fluency: many pages have wordy paragraphs. Lots of words are tricky because of the noises in them. Reading these pages as a shared reading lesson could help with fluency. Page 13, for example, has the sentence, "One chilly night, Sonya woke to a ruckus of squawking and shuffle-y bump noises from outside." This sentence takes some practice!
- Comprehension: The story is useful for working with chronology/ order of events. The teacher could read the story, then create a mix and match activity with different events from the story. The students would need to arrange them in the correct order.
What background knowledge do students need for this book?
- This is a rural setting so students should know something about what a farm is and what farmers do.
- This book features a mixed race family: the father is black and the mother is white.
- This is a nuclear family structure.
- Students needing additional background knowledge about farms/chickens could be shown a video about farming or taken on a field trip to a farm!
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