MORE HELP WITH MODIFIED BOOKS

Following my first blog on Modifying Books, some parents have had exciting success with modifying favorite books for their children–exciting because the kids love them and are eager to read. Others have asked for more examples, so here they are!

I won’t repeat guidelines here on how to do the modification; for that, read the first Modifying Books blog which gives the details.

EXAMPLE 1: Elmo Says Achoo!

The original read: Bert stacks cans. He stacks them nice and tall.

That was too much for my emergent readers, and the type was a serif font, harder to read. I substituted a sans-serif font, made the type larger, and put double spacing between words.

EXAMPLE 2: Shrek

This was a read-aloud book with dense paragraphs on every page, but my teenage students were keen on Shrek, so I modified it for their level. It was a hit. Now you can see why my first Modifying Books blog urged you to type on full-label sheets; sometimes you have to get creative with fitting it on the page.

EXAMPLE 3: Princess & The Frog

The original text was a serif font; I I substituted a sans-serif font, made the type larger, and put double spacing between words. I also simplified the text throughout when needed to keep the reading level consistent throughout; often, publishers don’t keep the reading level consistent throughout the book.

EXAMPLE 4: Brave

Here I’ll show you a before-and-after example from Brave. For a more advanced reader, this book works well on its own and doesn’t need to be modified: the spacing between lines is excellent, spacing between words is not bad, and we can live with the serif font in this case. But for emergent readers, you’d want to do something like the second example.

 EXAMPLE 5: Cinderella

The original text read: “Cinderella curled up under her blanket and yawned. She drifted off to sleep and started to dream a beautiful dream.”

EXAMPLE 6: Cars

These examples show two different levels of reading difficulty. For the mom who requested some samples of “Cars” books, here you are! If the second example is too advanced, you can modify it to this, one sentence to a page: “It was time to go to the big race. McQueen and Mack the truck were glad.” That’s all you need.

Re-Writing

Is it okay to rewrite the story? As long as it makes sense, yes. Sometimes the story is so complex that modifying is a challenge. Best advice is to pick the most important action on the page and simplify it as much as you can, matching your child’s level of reading ability.

You can do this…go for it!