Greedy Cat and the Birthday Cake 6-pack Author: Joy Cowley ISBN: 9780478123043 Copyright Date: 1999 Lesson Plan Blackline Master Grade Level: 3 Reading Level: M Strategy/Skill: Asking questions, Character study, Making connections, Sequencing Genre: General Narrative Theme/Topic: Food, Humor, Pets Classification: Fiction

Book Summary

Katie is making a chocolate cake for her mom’s birthday.  Greedy Cat smells the chocolate and decides that he doesn’t want meat and he doesn’t want cat snacks – he wants chocolate!

Features of the Book

• A well-known character
• Similes – That cat stretches like a balloon; The lights on the stove blinked like red eyes
• The humor in the illustrations, especially facial expressions
• Possessive apostrophes – Mom’s, Katie’s, Dad’s
• Compound words – birthday, baseball, bedroom, goldfish, pawprints, toothmarks
• Conventions of speech – quotation marks, exclamation points, question marks
• Evocative use of language – purr-fect; great, greedy gobble-guts

Purpose

Greedy Cat and the Birthday Cake can be used to introduce and reinforce the following skills:

• making connections between the text and students’ own experiences
• identifying the main problem in the story
• recognizing and discussing the development of the characters
• interpreting and analyzing characters’ feelings, relationships, and actions
• recognizing and retelling events in sequence

For more information please see our Lesson Plan