Sailor Sam and the Birds

Sailor Sam and the Birds is a humorous and realistic fiction story about Sailor Sam trying to feed the hungry birds coming up to the boat. When he fed them some bread, the birds came on the boat, and the boat started to wobble. The captain tried to get rid of the birds by hosing them down, but she hosed Sailor Sam too! The story is narrated with dialogue, illustrative text, onomatopoeia, and speech bubbles.

Sailor Sam and the Birds is a simple narrative story. Critical thinking questions are provided to guide the reader. Illustrations match the text. A visual information guide is provided for teachers to draw students’ attention to the illustrative text and bold font as well as the speech bubbles, layout, and design. There is an exemplar of rules at the end of the book to show Rules for Sailor Sam. An activity on creating rules for them at home is provided for teachers to extend students’ learning.

Readers develop vocabulary such as interest words (squawk), high-frequency words (can’t), and positional words (up). Opportunities arise to discuss capital letters for the beginning of names (Sailor Sam), full stops, commas, quotation marks, and exclamation marks. Focus on blend br (bread), word family ame (came), and suffix ed (shouted).

This title is from the Sails Literacy series. Hook readers and ignite their curiosity - over 850 levelled texts with bright, colourful, sophisticated designs.