Children’s Literature Log
Literacy Teaching and Learning in Diverse Elementary Classrooms, Part I
My Name: Amy Carter
Date: November 14, 2008
Title: The Sneetches and Other Stories
Author: Dr. Seuss
Genre: Comedy and Humor; general fiction
Cover Image (if available):
Approximate Reading Level: Grade Level Equivalent: 3.5
Summary:
This book actually includes several short stories, but my favorite is “The Sneetches,” a
Seussian take on discrimination. In the book, some Sneetches have stars on their bellies,
and others have “none upon thars.” The Star-Bellied Sneetches lord it over the other
Sneetches, until a wily con man, Sylvester McMonkey McBean (love the name – sounds
like someone who would be played by Groucho Marx), shows up with a machine that
puts stars on the Plain-Bellied Sneetches. When everyone has stars, of course, the
original Star-Bellied Sneetches are horrified, until the con man produces another machine
that removes their stars. After that, they lord it over the new Star-Bellied Sneetches, who
of course opt to have their stars removed. Pretty soon, the Sneetches are moving back
and forth through both machines, until they finally run out of money. Finally, the
Sneetches realize that it really doesn’t matter who has stars and who has “none upon
thars.”
Implications for Teaching:
As with other Seuss books, this one lends itself to many uses:
 With primary-level students, it can be used as a read-aloud to introduce rhyme
schemes and word families.
 Because it is fairly long, it can be broken into smaller units to use for a short readaloud activity at the end of the day.
 Individual pages from the unit could be copied, and students could be asked to
identify the rhyme scheme and word families.
 Because of the text’s predictable structure, this might lend itself well to a text talk
in which the teacher reads a page aloud, writes an unfamiliar word on the board,
and models decoding the word. The teacher then displays the picture to show
students that they were correct. For example, when McBean first shows up, he
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tells the Sneetches his work is “100 per cent guaranteed.” Follow-up questions
would encourage students’ higher-order thinking skills:
o What does “guaranteed” mean? (Bloom’s taxonomy level 2 –
comprehension);
o Can you give me an example of something “guaranteed”? (Level 3 –
application)
o Why do we want things “guaranteed”? (Level 4 – analysis)
o How could you test a guarantee? (Level 5 – synthesis)
o Can something be “guaranteed” if it is not “100 percent”? How we
measure “guaranteed”? Is it an absolute? (Level 6 – evaluation)
Other questions about the text could also encourage higher-order thinking. For
example, when the con man shows up with his Star-On machine, students could
be asked to identify the machine’s parts. Then, when he brings out the Star-Off
machine, students could compare and contrast the two.
o What parts are the same? What are different? (Level 4 – analysis).
o What do you think the insides of the machines look like? (Level 5 –
synthesis).
Because Seuss’s rhymes flow off the tongue so easily, more advanced readers will
enjoy the challenge of reading the text aloud. It could be used very effectively in
a buddy-reading program between an intermediate and a primary class.
The rhymes also might make this book useful for a repeated reading strategy to
improve a student’s fluency.
Dr. Jacquelynn Malloy tells me that she used Sneetches for a class play. It sounds
like a great idea, so I’d steal it. Students could tape stars to their bellies, decorate
a refrigerator box to resemble a Star-On machine (if they flip it around, the other
side could be the Star-Off machine), practice lines from the book (improving their
fluency and their oral language skills), and act it out for a younger class.
As an alternative to the play, it could be a puppet show. Students could make
Sneetch puppets using construction paper cut-outs glued to popsicle sticks. The
Sneetches would be two-sided, with stars on one side. The Star-On and Star-Off
machines would be easy to make out of boxes. For the scene where the Sneetches
are moving back and forth between the machines, as the action becomes more
frenetic, it would be funny just to have the students spin the popsicle sticks in
their hands. (This could be a small-group project as part of an author study on Dr.
Seuss, in which various reading groups read different Seuss books and create
various culminating products.)
As a follow-on activity, students might watch Seuss videos. I looked online to see
if the video of The Sneetches is still available. It was released as part of the DVD
Dr. Seuss: Green Eggs and Ham and Other Stories (Universal, 2003). I didn’t
find it at Amazon.com, but used versions might still be circulating on eBay.
School libraries might also have it (the Prince William County library’s only copy
is lost).
Finally, and perhaps most obviously, this would be a great read-aloud for a unit
on diversity and fairness. One could contrast the treatment of the Plain-Bellied
Sneetches (who are not allowed on the beaches), with other examples of
discrimination, such as Jim Crow laws in the American South and the caste
system in India.