Have You Seen My Cat?

Another Eric Carle book where repetition plays a large role, but I like this one for at least trying to making educational connections between the various large, wild cats of the world and their habitats, though I'm not sure stereotyping wardrobes of the people inhabiting those areas was the best way to go about it.

I was disappointed the regions and cat breeds weren't explicitly named in end notes at least, but my copy is a board book version, and I wonder if the paperback or some other version was able to spare a few pages to amp up the educational aspect.

This board book is horribly frustrating, Liam broke it within a minute of getting it, and I have been taping it continually ever since. The pull out flaps are very, very fragile, surely there was some other way to do this? The global population representatives seem stereotyped, but the cats are delightful.

Kids learn about cats through negation. That is not my cat...THAT is not my cat...wonderfully illustrated and sure to delight young classes by energetic readings.

This book revolves around a little boy adventuring, seemingly around the world, in attempts to find his missing cat. He comes across a tiger, puma, leopard, lion, and even more exotic cats in search of his house cat. In the end, he does end up finding his house cat after multiple attempts as he explores different cultures and encounters different types of cats.
Not only do I believe this book has a lot of potential in terms of discussion of a wordless picture book, but I also believe that students can use this book to connect different types of cats (animals) to different cultures/places around the world.

I did not particularly care for this book because the writing in it was not very eventful. It wasn't anything that made me personally excited to read it. However, I would recommend this book to beginning readers because although it lacked substance, the repetitive nature of the book would be great for those children who are learning to read because the words are simple and the sentences repeat. I did enjoy the illustrations, as I do with all Eric Carle books because they are so vivid and eye-catching. The message overall in this book was that a boy eventually found his cat after looking all over to find it.

Terrific pictures, great to see different kinds of cats, and people, all around the world. But totally irresponsible to let your cat run free and have kittens - will they be able to find homes for them?

One of my son's favorite books is Have You Seen My Cat? by Eric Carle. Last night we had one of our marathon reading sessions of the book. It's quite a simple text with lots of repetition. Having grown bored with reading the same text over and over, I did an on the fly translation into Spanish. After lots of "¿Lo visto mi gato?" and "Este no es mi gato," my son started pointing angrily at the words insisting I read them in English. At least he's figured out that the words might actually mean something. Maybe he'll be an early reader.