Shh! We Have a Plan

Title: Shh! We Have a Plan 
Author: Chris Haughton   
Illustrator: Chris Haughton   
Publisher: Walker
Publication Date: March 6th, 2014 
Genre/Format: Fiction/Picture Book 
GoodReads Summary: From award-winning illustrator Chris haughton, one of the most exciting new voices in children's literature, comes a brand new picture book about a beautiful bird, an unquenchable desire and plans gone awry...Four friends, three big and one little, are out for a walk. Suddenly, they spot it - a beautiful bird perched high in a tree! They simply MUST have it and - SHH! - they have a PLAN. So they tip-toe, tip-toe very slowly, nets poised - "Ready one...ready two...ready three...GO!" But, at the turn of the page, we find a ridiculous bunch of very tangled characters and a blissfully oblivious bird, flying away.  
What I Think: We've read books by Chris Haughton before but during the Cybils judging this year, we downloaded, played, and fell in love with the Hat Monkey app. As part of the app, you can get a glimpse into Little Owl Lost, Oh No, George! and Shh! We Have a Plan. The next time we visited the library, we tracked down all three of these books and happily read them all over and over again with a renewed excitement. Little Bean especially loved Shh! We Have a Plan and if we read it once, we had to read at least three more times. He can read it all by himself and with such emotion. It's awesome. I love when books capture kids like this. It reminds me of when we read Warning: Do Not Open This Book! by Adam Lehrhaupt. That was another that we read over and over and that got him excited every single time. It's so fun to watch.
     Repetitive books are great for the youngest readers. You can see the anticipation build in them as they start to realize what's going to happen next. So much fun!  
     For older readers, this might be a great opportunity to think about how repetition might be used in a story but also how putting in a twist when the reader least expects it really makes a story fun. They can easily right their own stories where something happens over and over again until something different happens and they can write their own silly twists in.
Read Together: Pre-K - 2  
Read Alone: Pre-K - 2 
Read With: Little Owl Lost and Oh No, George! by Chris Haughton, Hug by Jez Alborough, Warning: Do Not Open This Book! by Adam Lehrhaupt
Snatch of Text:  

"Ready one...

ready two...

ready three...

GO!"

Writing Prompts: Write about a time when you did something good for someone or when someone did something nice for you. How did it make your feel?

I *heart* It: