There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly, Adapted and Illustrated by Simms Taback

Title: There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly
Adaptor/Illustrator: Simms Taback
Reading level: Ages 4-8
Hardcover: 32 pages
Publisher: Viking Juvenile; 1 edition (September 1, 1997)
ISBN-10: 0670869392
ISBN-13: 978-0670869398

Synopsis*:  An old lady swallows a fly. What on earth will she do? How will she get it out? She tries swallowing a cat to get rid of the spider, but then the cat was stuck. So then the old lady tried swallowing a dog... How on earth is she ever going to get them all out?

Review: Simms Taback uses brightly colored graphics using mixed media and collage on Kraft paper to help illustrate the traditional folk poem "There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly". On its own, the story is very amusing; add in Taback's witty art and related extras (a recipe for Spider Soup on the page for the spider; a listing of common birds of the Americas on the birds page) and kids will be downright delighted. The old lady is depicted with kookily crossed eyes and a staggering gait. The pages are die cut with increasingly bigger holes to show all the things swimming around in the old lady's stomach as she tries in vain to get them out. The test is handwritten on brightly colored scraps of paper, making it easy for young readers to follow along with the librarian/teacher/parent/adult reading the story to the children, and it's just silly enough to keep a child's attention.

Awards/Reviews: 

  

Notable Book designation (1998), American Library Association (ALA)

Caldecott Honor Book (1998), ALA

New York Times Best Illustrated Children’s Book

Children’s Book of the Year selection from The American Institute of Graphic Arts.

"Children of all ages will joyfully swallow this book whole." Publishers Weekly

"The old lady... looks wacky enough to go so far as to swallow a horse." School Library Journal

"It is good fun to watch the old lady bulge and bloat, and the sheer corniness of the verse continues to be deeply gratifying." Kirkus Reviews

Connections:

Teach young students the melody of the song (if they don't already know it) and have them join you on singing the lyrics "I don't know why she swallowed the fly." The teacher will point to the words of this line as she reads it to help students learn to recognize the words on sight.

For classroom use with Kindergarteners, this is a good book to use for sequencing. Ask students to predict what will happen. As the story goes on, ask students to predict what animal the old lady will swallow next. What will happen to her? Ask students to remember the sequence in which the old lady swallows things - from little bugs to big animals. Then ask students to remember the reverse order, from big to little. This is early preparation for learning about sequences. https://home.comcast.net/~leighanne.kraemer/Lesson%20Plans/LangArts/Interactive%20Read%20Aloud%20There%20Was%20an%20Old%20Lady.doc

Have students create their own "Old Lady" using some photocopied old lady heads, arms and legs taped to a sandwich baggie. Then allow students to color and decorate photocopied outlines of horses, dogs, spiders, etc. for them to use to tell the stories themselves. This can be used to reinforce the unit listed above on sequencing.

*It is noted in the back of the book that "There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly" is an American folk poem first heard in the United States in the 1940's. Several different versions of the poem were collected and published in Hoosier Folklore (December 1947); the original author is unknown.