Pistes d'exploration

Browse the illustrations. Compare what you see to what you expect to see in a story about Old MacDonald. How might this story be different?

Make connections between the text and the illustrations. How do the machines help Old MacDonald do her work?

Design your own crazy machine that helps with a task you do every day (such as brushing your teeth or picking up your toys). Draw and label a diagram of your machine.

Write a poem or story that incorporates a rule about what letters you can and cannot use. For example, in your story or poem, each sentence or line could feature a different vowel exclusively.

Review or learn the original version of “Old MacDonald Had a Farm.”

Join in during the recurrent parts of the read-aloud.

Discuss how the two versions are similar or different. Use a graphic organizer to show your results.

What is special about the verses? Practise saying them as tongue twisters.

In pairs, create a new verse. Choose a letter to feature in your verse.

Mots-clés

Poetry , farm animals , farms , onomatopoeias , rhymes , tongue twisters , wordplay

Commentaire descriptif

The animals in this story are the same ones as in the popular list song—pigs, goats, cows, horses, ducks—but that’s about the only similarity. No one ever said Old MacDonald had to be a man, and sure enough, in this incarnation, the farmer is female, grey hair flying as she drags her thresher through a wheat field. The refrain has changed as well, to a more pedagogically inclined list of vowels. Most noticeably, the book is poetic, with each verse a lipogrammatic univocalic—that is, each verse is a constrained-writing word game, using only one vowel. “Old MacDonald had her farm,” the book begins, “a e i o u.And when she came across an a, this is what she’d do.” The word choices are simple; the pleasure is derived from their arrangement, and especially from reading aloud. When she gets to e, we see Old MacDonald “sneeze deep helpless sneezesthen fetch fresh cheesewhere dew-wet treesmeet the sweet bee breezes.” The full-page, brightly coloured drawings show a madcap farm, with Old MacDonald as likely to be astride a tricycle as a tractor, and all manner of imaginative devices used to hoist hogs, mix flour or whirl plums down a slide, bounce them off a pillow and plop them down, where they are promptly snapped up by delighted purple-snouted goats. Laughing readers will soon be singing a new set of lyrics to an old familiar tune.