Nocturnal Animals, by Ryan Flynn

Ryan gets to make lots of little books while at Kindergarten. Much of the time he is supposed to draw something and then try to write down how he thinks it should be spelled. This leads to some, well, interesting spellings. He has come along way since Kindergarten started. He was not interested in writing letters much at all before school and now he likes to write quite a bit.

Some of the books that he makes have a theme. The book I am posting has such a theme. I will post the book page by page with a description of what he was drawing.


The Title Page


A Firefly


An Owl that eats snakes


A firefly again. Ryan tried to put the first letter of the various body parts. There is a backwards "h" for head, an "A" for antenna, "w" for wings, and even a "w" for light or rather "wight" the way Ryan thought it would be spelled.

This is the first page that made me chuckle. A Skunk. Notice him spraying. Yeah, Ryan thought that was great. Remember he is making this at school. I wonder what the teacher thought. At the bottom he tried to spell two words. I am unsure of the first and the second is skunk.

Then if a regular ol' skunk is funny then what does a boy do to top that? Well you make the skunk have super powers of course. BEHOLD, the FIRESKUNK! Instead of spraying regular stinky stuff, this skunk shots fire out of his rearend. Brilliant! Again Ryan tried to spell "fire" then "skunk".

And that was it. For some reason when I read it I was not expecting anything like this. I belly laughed. Bridget was a little put out that I laughed, "I made sure I didn't laugh when I read it, you're encouraging him," she said. Well, what can I say, I thought it was funny. But then I was always amused by body function related humor. Like father, like son.