Alfie the Apostrophe by Moira Rose Donohue

Book Genre: fiction

Publishing Info: Scholastic, 29 pages

Awards or honors received: N/A

Summary: This story is about an apostrophe named Alfie. Alfie was a young apostrophe who went to school with other punctuation marks. The annual punctuation-mark talent show was the next day. Alfie was worried that he didn’t have any talent. He practiced in his bedroom but couldn’t get his magic tricks to work correctly. The next day at school everyone was excited to perform in the talent show. The question marks went first and they told riddles and jokes that made everyone laugh. Then the exclamation points cheered in their cheerleading outfits. Alfie began to get more worried. The parentheses worked with the commas and quotation marks to perform a jump rope routine, but they all got tangled up. Last went a group of periods and hyphens. They performed in Morse code. The director was about to end the show when Alfie raised his hand to present his magic tricks. First Alfie pulled out the words can and not. He covered them with a scarf and said the magic words. When he lifted the scarf, two letters had disappeared and the contraction can’t appeared. He did the same thing changing will and not into won’t. Then for his final act he performed his “possessive” trick. The crowd went wild and Alfie was very happy to be an apostrophe.

Personal rating and reason for rating: *** This was a nice story with pictures of the different types of punctuation marks as characters. Students will see the marks as you are reading about the usage of each one.

Reading level: 3.2

Interest level: 1-4

Possible uses of the text: Literacy: This story would be a good lead-in for introducing contractions. Have student’s create “magic tricks” by changing two words into a contraction. Then they can be the detective to find which of the letters went missing. Make this activity into a game. Practice making contractions and reverse it, so the contraction becomes the two words. Re-read story when you teach about possessive nouns. Have students create a list of things that belong to them and write it with the apostrophe (Linda’s book). Students can then illustrate their belongings.

Potential Problems or Difficulties: this story might be a little difficult for the younger children, teacher will have to explain a lot as she reads.