Swimmy

                                           Swimmy

                           by: Leo Lionni

A happy school of little fish lived in a corner of the sea somewhere. They were all red. Only one of them was as black as a mussel shell. He swam faster than his brothers and sisters. His name was Swimmy.

One bad day a tuna fish, swift, fierce and very hungry, came darting through the waves. In one gulp he swallowed all the little red fish. Only Swimmy escaped.

He swam away in the deep wet world. He was scared, lonely, and very sad.

But the sea was full of wonderful creatures, and as he swam from marvel to marvel Swimmy was happy again.

He saw a medusa made of rainbow jelly...

a lobster, who walked about like a water-moving machine...

strange fish, pulled by an invisible thread...

a forest of seaweeds growing from sugar-candy rocks...

an eel whose tail was almost too far away to remember...

and sea anemones, who looked like pink palm trees swaying in the wind.

Then, hidden in the dark shade of rocks and weeds, he saw a school of little fish, just like his own.

"Let's go and swim and play and SEE things!" he said happily.

"We can't," said the little red fish. "The big fish will eat us all."

"But you can't just lie there," said Swimmy. "We must THINK of something."

Swimmy thought and thought and thought.

Then suddenly he said, "I have it!"

"We are going to swim all together like the biggest fish in the sea!"

He taught them to swim close together, each in his own place,

and when they had learned to swim like one giant fish, he said, "I'll be the eye."

And so they swam in the cool morning water and in the midday sun and chased the big fish away.

Lionni, Leo. Swimmy. New York, New York: Scholastic, Inc., 1963.

The goal of my book, Swimmy, is to reinforce the concepts of reading comprehension for my kindergarten students. These concepts include the skills of retelling, making predictions, and understanding plot and setting. These skills are in correspondence with the Massachusetts Educational Frameworks in English Language Arts:

8.1: Make predictions using prior knowledge, pictures, and text

            8.2: Retell a main event from a story heard or read

            8.3: Ask questions about the important characters, settings, and events

            13.5: Restate main ideas and important facts from a text heard or read.

Furthermore, this book allows students to hear the written text on each page,  access a glossary to help them with unknown words, and get help from the coaches. The first coach, Cassidy, reads the text on the page. Trace, the second coach asks the reader comprehension questions while the third coach, Riley, asks personal connection questions.