Christopher Santoro

his is a complete, out of the park hit with my 4 year old, combining dinosaurs and construction equipment, which he loves, with an alphabet plot (which I'm interested in). A group of construction-worker dinosaurs is called in to build a mysterious thing, which turns out-- on the last 2 page spread-- to be a sort of adventure park. It reads well, and has some catchy lines; while not every word in the page for a letter begins with it-- or where would the plot be?-- the text emphasizes the show more letter of the page both at the beginning of words and within words. X and Q, with their E words, might be confusing to a child; but the rest is great alphabet fun. The silly dinosaurs are on every page doing different things (my son especially likes the various dinos in A-shirts jigglingly running jackhammers, and the creation of the volcano, followed by vamoosing!) Compare with B is for Bulldozer or Dinosaurs Dig! show less

Automatically, this book caught my attention because I recognized the first few words “Old MacDonald Had a – “, but then the next word, ‘Dragon’, caught me off guard. This book was a nice twist of from the original Old MacDonald song. It is most definitely a fiction book because of this would really be happening. I’m not sure if I liked or disliked the book because it was weird. The language was written like the actual song and then it went back into story mode. Every time one of show more the farm animals would bad mouth the dragon, the dragon would eat them and say two words that start with the same letter. For example, Delightful Dairy, Savory Swine, Marvelous Mutton, and Delectable Doggy. I liked this part of the book because this play with words could actually teach something to the reader. For example, young readers may night know what swine is but after using all the context clues and pictures, the would have a good idea of what it meant. The author also added in certain phrases or puns that related to the animals as well. For example, the cow came to the farmer and said “I’ve got a beef with you”. I actually though this was very funny and it made me smile. Small unexpected things like this in a book really engages the reader. The characters were the farm animals, the farmer and the dragon. They’re not realistic figures because they can all talk to the farmer. The point of view of the story comes from 3rd person. The plot was very organized and there was a problem and a solution. I liked that the problem started very suddenly because it was unexpected that the dragon was going to eat all of the animals. I think the underlying message of the story was that you should appreciate what you have because it can be gone in an instant. It could also be that you should trust your old friends because the new ones could be no good in the end. The farmer kept defending having the dragon on the farm and when the animals would complain, the dragon would eat them. Then the farmer was left all alone and all of a sudden the dragon ate him too. I liked the illustrations because they were very clear and they explained the story perfectly. Seeing the facial expressions of the characters, would tell you the story before you even had to read the words. I like this because I feel like sometimes students may not be able to read and they wouldn’t be discouraged after reading seeing the pictures. This is a very engaging book because I even noticed that I was singing the tune as I was reading and I even found myself anxious to know what would happen to the animals and the farmer at the end of the book. show less

In Old MacDonald Had a Dragon, the farmer has a dragon who systematically swallows up the other farm animals when they complain that a dragon has no place on a farm.

The illustrations in this book are bright and colorful. The story was silly and I personally didn’t find it terribly original. However, my six and eight year old boys both gave it a thumbs up and said they thought it was funny. It also taught them some new expressions, which may or may not be a good thing: dog-gone, two-bit and show more having a “beef” with someone.

And don’t worry (SPOILER ALERT) – everyone gets burped out of the dragon in the end and avoids permanent injury. show less

I'm not sure what the intention of this story was if it wasn't just generally to have a bit of goofy fun. I wasn't that into it though. The word play seemed to trump all else in this one and the story was just a pile of strange. It could loosely be called a tall tale, but it wasn't developed enough to earn that distinction by my standards.