MR McGee and the Biting Flea - Book selection and analysis

Pamela Allen’s children’s picture book Mr McGee and the Biting Flea (1998), is about a young man, Mr McGee and a dog who go to the beach one windy day to fly a kite when he is bitten by a troublesome flea. The story describes the humorous measures that Mr McGee goes to, to try to get rid of the biting flea. This book was selected for a year level one classroom for the reading and writing component of the curriculum, in particular, having a focus on phonics and different parts of speech.

Verbs are evident throughout the story, which is used to describe the actions of Mr McGee. Children have to develop an understanding of verbs because it places meaning on actions, which they are hopefully familiar with before making sense of the word (Snape & Krott, 2018). Rhyme can support these ideas as it creates rhythm through the text, helping to produce a certain mood (Seely Flint, 2020). Allen achieves this from conveying Mr McGee’s panic through the repetition of his actions. Many of the action verbs end in “ing”, for example; running, singing, and leaping, which create rhyming through the repetition of the sound.

Phonological awareness is a meta-cognitive skill that allows for the understanding of sound in language – more specifically the sounds that letters make when spoken (Kuo, Uchikoshi, Kim, & Yang, 2016). The Phonic-First approach is a skill-based approach that focuses on the sound that language makes when learning how to read (Seely Flint, 2020). This is utilised in a classroom setting because students can develop a letter-sound relationship with text that they are reading. This is relevant to Allen’s book as there is a range of different graphophonic letter combinations that make the same sound. Examples of these include ‘ee’, ‘ea’ and ‘e’, with the words being ‘flea’, ‘sea’ and ‘be’.

References

Allen, P. (1998). Mr McGee and the Biting Flea. Ringwood: Puffin.

Kuo, L., Uchikoshi, Y., Kim, T., & Yang, X. (2016). Bilingualism and Phonological Awareness: Re-examining Theories of Cross-Language Transfer and Structural Sensitivity. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 46, 1-9. Retrieved from

https://www-sciencedirectcom.ezproxy2.acu.edu.au/science/article/pii/

S0361476X16000138

Seely Flint, K. L. (2020). Literacy in Australia Pedagogies for engagement . Milton: Wiley & Sons.

Snape, S., & Krott, A. (2018). The benefit of simultaneously encountered exemplars and of exemplar variability to verb learning. Journal of Child Language,45(6), 1412-1422. Retrieved from https://search-proquest-com.ezproxy2.acu.edu.au/docview/2116523411?accountid=8194&rfr_id=info%3Axri%2Fsid%3Aprimo