Fiction Readers: Barnaby Dell

Barnaby Dell is a humorous and realistic fiction story about a very lazy farmer. One day he decided to take a nap when he felt too tired. All of the animals napped too…until a horsefly flew over the farm! It bit donkey, and donkey woke the whole farm up! Barnaby got all the animals to calm down…but the horsefly was waiting. The story is narrated with dialogue, illustrations, onomatopoeia and illustrative text.

Barnaby Dell is a simple narrative story. Illustrations match the text. Draw students’ attention to the visual features including the illustrative text (italics), layout, and design. Opportunities arise to discuss with students how the text style changes (capitals) to show when there is a loud noise or someone yelling. 

Readers develop vocabulary such as verbs (milked) and adjectives (laziest). Focus on suffixes and base words (started). Opportunities arise to discuss apostrophes to show possession (hens’), apostrophes within contractions (won’t), capital letters at the beginning of sentences and names (Barnaby Dell), question marks, quotation marks, exclamation marks, and commas.

This title is from the Fiction Readers series from Teacher Created Materials. Stimulate the imagination and promote creative thinking through real-world themes captured in entertaining stories.