I like the story (I read Phoebe Gilman's Something from Nothing earlier this year), but wasn't a huge fan of the art style.

This is a great book to get your students to follow along and predict what will happen next. There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly is about an old woman who swallows all of these "things" and the story is describing a food chain. Students love this book and find it fun and engaging. It is placed at a 2.0 (2nd grade) reading level from accelerated reader leveling system. There are tons of different versions of these books for different holidays (culture). A great activity for the students is to get the students to make a timeline of what happened, first, second, .... and last. 

Many children are already familiar with the "old lady" books. There are so many now! I am going to focus on one that delivers its own version of the original classic, There Was An Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly, by Lucille Colandro. The story uses rhyming text and hilarious illustrations to engage the reader. The main character, the old lady, swallows an entire menagerie of animals with each one being bigger than the last. Kids will enjoy the fun, colorful pictures and repetition. 

This book would be the perfect book for a lesson on rhyming words or sequencing. Have students cut and paste pictures from the story in sequential order or create a list of rhyming words following a class discussion of the rhyming words found in the story. 

Recommended for Ages: 5-8

Lexile Level: AD280L 

There Was An Old Lady That Swallowed A Fly, written by Simms Taback, is such a colorful and fun book. It’s about an old lady who continues to swallow different things to go and chase the thing that was previously swallowed. I can use this book in my classroom to teach sequencing, rhyming and concepts about print! We as a class can discuss what happens in the story in sequential order and Identify which animal/insect came first.

5 stars

Lexile AD250L

This book (and song) is about a woman who swallowed a fly, a spider, a bird, and even more. The activity I would use with this book would be in a literacy center. I would have an old woman with Velcro on her abdomen and Velcro attached to different animals. The students must place the animals in order of when the woman swallowed them. The students will write down their sequence on the activity sheet and submit it, so I can check for understanding. 

Reading Level: Lexile AD320L

Grades: PreK-2nd