Explain to students that descriptive writing can bring the five senses to life while reading. During reading, have students imagine how bad the stench actually is on order to help develop a stronger understanding of why Father badly wants Walter out of the house.

This book uses several excellent adverbs, showing how a character is feeling or even how he or she is speaking. Certain words can also be used in a vocabulary lesson, such as hopefully (p.5), or even other uses for “said” such as roared (p.15). These direct quotes can be reread with expression based on how the character is speaking, dictated by the author’s word choice.

Word choices include: rectal, flatulence, pleaded, torture, gnashed, hideous, clutched

Certain words that may be new to the reader may not be easy to figure out through the use of context clues. Have students define specific words that they may never have seen. A medical phrase, such as ‘rectal flatulence’, is used in this text. Although the vet in the story mentions it as an alternative to the word ‘farting’, it isstill a strong phrase and can help later on with word choice in writing, if the topic were to ever come up.