"Slowly, Slowly, Slowly," said the Sloth

Title: “Slowly, Slowly, Slowly,” said the Sloth
Author: Eric Carle
Publisher: Philomel Books
Date of Publication: 2002
Illustrator: Eric Carle
Genre Designation: Children’s Fiction
Readability Lexile: Pre-K-1 (ages 4-7)

Summary:
All the animals wonder why the sloth is so lazy and slow.  All the sloth did all day and night was hang upside down in the tree.  Many of the animals asked sloth why he was so slow, but sloth didn’t answer.  Then one day the jaguar asked, “Tell me, why are you so lazy?”  Sloth thought for a long, long, long time.  Finally, sloth had an answer and told the animals about why he is the way he is. 

Evaluation:
This story is a nice story to introduce students to timing.  Eric Carle does a great job of forcing the reader to slow down, and really read the words when they look at this story.  The story has a lot of words that would work nicely for new readers to use their sounding out skill on while reading through the story.  Eric Carle uses alliteration throughout the story, which can be seen even in the title of the story.  The story does a nice job of reading the reader at the end of the story that everything is not always a race, and that sometimes we can go slow just because.  The artwork that Eric Carle does is nothing short of beautiful.  The way it looks so “unprofessional” makes it almost more relatable for a reader.  The story could be used to introduce animals, sloths to be more specific.  It could also be used to introduce understanding and accepting others differences, as well as not judging others to quickly.  The story has so many purposes that it can be used for a variety of reasons, and that in itself makes it a good to story in my opinion. 

Illustrations:
The illustrations are exactly the type of illustrations that we have all come to know and love by Eric Carle.  The different colors he uses as well as the shapes you can find within the specific animals is almost a lesson in itself.  The illustrations go very nicely with what the author is trying to communicate to the reader. 

Mini-Lesson:
For this mini-lesson the focus would be on sloths and alliteration.  As individuals each student would come up with an “S” word.  We would then come up with an entire class sloth alliteration.  We would then as a class see how long we could be sloths by moving slowly, slowly, slowly for a little bit of our day.