THIRD READING: ANALYSIS – MILLIONS OF CATS

During this reading, your child and you have prior knowledge of how the text and illustrations fit together. Now, your interaction with the story will move to a higher level of thinking. The activities and questions below are considered “higher order thinking.” Activities and questions like these give the brain practice in being open to new ideas and creative thinking habits. Open-ended questions strengthen the brain by building new synapses (connections that increase our recall and retention).

For this reading you have the choice of how you read the story:

~reversing roles. Your child tells/”reads” the story, and you become the listener and questioner.

~ alternating the reading of pages with your child.

~pausing to allow your listener to fill in the next word or complete the sentence.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS:

~Is this story a fairy tale?

Fairy tales are a kind of story that usually begin with “Once upon a time…..” and end with “they lived happily ever after.” Fairy tales usually have a problem that the characters solve. Fairy tales frequently have talking animals.

~If so, can we think of other fairy tales like Millions of Cats?

~The very old man wanted to pick a beautiful cat for the very old woman. Then, the cats quarreled over which cat was the prettiest. Is that the way that you would choose a cat? Is beauty the most important characteristic when picking a pet? How would you describe beauty?

~Was the very old man’s and the very old woman’s solution for picking a cat a good one? How would you have decided on which cat to keep?

~Discuss the math words: hundreds, thousands, millions, billions, and trillions. Can you and your child think of anything that there are hundreds of, thousands of, millions of, billions of, or trillions of?

ACTIVITIES:

~Below is a very simple graphic organizer, a visual way to organize information.

Each column represents a quantity. Have your child put marks such as x’s, dots, or tally marks to represent the quantities. Having an exact number isn’t important. In the hundreds column, there should be quite a few dots. In the thousands column, there should be many more than in the hundreds column. Continue with each column having many more than the previous column. Our goal is to illustrate that each word starting with hundreds is many dots, but less than thousands. Thousands is a larger number of dots, but less than millions. Each column is to have more dots than the previous column. Stress the order of: hundreds, thousands, millions, billions, trillions.

HUNDREDS, THOUSANDS, MILLIONS, BILLIONS, TRILLIONS

SECOND READING: TEXT AND VOCABULARY – MILLIONS OF CATS

As you read, you’ll discover whether the inferences and predictions that you made based on the illustrations match the text . There are some great vocabulary words to highlight. Look for clues in both the illustrations and the text that might help to explain the highlighted vocabulary.

Pages 1 – 3:

~On page 3, trudged: to walk wearily, to plod along. What word could we put in the sentence to keep the meaning of the sentence the same? (walked)

Pages 4 – 5:

~Read this page with rhythm.

~Talk about the quantities: hundreds, thousands, millions, billions, and trillions. Keep the  explanations very simple: Hundreds is quite a few cats. Thousands would be a lot more than hundreds. Millions is many, many thousands. Billions is many, many millions, and so on. Do you think the old man could count that many cats?

Pages 6 – 11:

~By the time you have read page 11, how many cats has the man chosen? What reason does he give for choosing each cat?

~On page 11, bear: tolerate. What does the word bear mean in this context? Why couldn’t the very, old man bear to leave any cat behind?

Pages 12 – 13:

~Stress the order and the rhythm of ”hundreds and thousands and millions and billions and trillions of cats.”

~How would you react if you saw “hundreds and thousands and millions and billions and trillions of cats” following a very old man? Would you laugh? What would the cats sound like?

Pages 14 – 17:

~Enjoy repeating the refrain with rhythm: “Hundreds of cats, Thousands of cats, Millions and billions and trillions of cats.”

Pages 18 – 19:

~Point out the exclamation mark. It means that the sentence is spoken with extra feeling and importance. How might the very old lady say, “My dear!”?

~On page 19, how do you think the very old woman might be saying this?

~Can the very old man and woman keep the cats? What problems might occur?

Page 20 – 21:

~What does “They will eat us out of house and home” mean? (The cats will eat everything!)

~On page 21, quarrel: fight. What does quarrel mean? Are there clues to the meaning of quarrel in the illustration and the text?

Page 22 – 23:

~Note each of the exclamation marks. Make sure to read the sentences ending in “!” with feeling.

~Could the cats have eaten each other? If not, what do you think might have happened to the cats?

~On page 23, scraggly: shaggy, not taken care of. What might have caused the kitten to be scraggly?

~Remember why the very old man chose the first cats. (They were beautiful.) Do you think the man and the woman will keep a thin and scraggly kitten?

Page 24 – 28:

~On page 24, homely: not attractive or good looking. What does homely mean? Can you find clues in the text that tell you that homely means the opposite of pretty? (The other cats didn’t bother the little kitten as they fought to determine who was the prettiest.)

~On page 27, plump: chubby. Can you tell from the illustrations what plump means? Can you think of a word that means the opposite of plump? (thin, skinny)

~What words described the kitten when they found it? (scraggly, homely, thin)What words described the kitten after it had been with the very old man and woman for a while? (plumb, pretty)

~What made the kitten “the most beautiful cat in the whole world”?