Fiction Readers: The Happy Faces Leave Home

The Happy Faces Leave Home is a fictional animal fantasy story about a mother happy-face spider and all of her children. The children happy-face spiders wanted happy faces on their back just like their mom. When they finally grew up, they left home and started to write postcards about their adventures to their mother! The story is narrated with dialogue, illustrations, text boxes, postcards, illustrative text, and stamps.

The Happy Faces Leave Home is a simple narrative story designed as a series of postcards from the happy-face spiders to their mother. Illustrations match the text. Draw students’ attention to the visual features including the illustrative text as well as the layout and design of a postcard. Opportunities arise to discuss the purpose and structure of a postcard and the information included in a postcard. 

Readers develop vocabulary such as compound words (sailboat), positional words (outside) and verbs (exploring). Focus on suffixes and base words (chased). Opportunities arise to discuss capital letters at the beginning of sentences and names (Mother Happy Face), 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.