No Reading Allowed, a fun look at homonyms for ages 7 and up

Homonyms and homophones are evil, foul words that use the English language as their playing field. I watch as some of my ESL students twist and turn their minds in order to grapple with the fact that know or no and new and knew can exist in the same language universe. Having words that sound the same, but are spelled differently, yet pronounced the same, and have different meanings is a trick that’s exclusive to the English language. I thought that too, but homonyms are in fact, evil foul words that exist in every language. No Reading Allowed, The Worst Read-Aloud Book.

To muddy things even further, homonyms are broadly defined as homographs and homophones. Homographs are words that have the same spelling but different meanings or pronunciation. Whereas, homophones are words that sound alike, but have different spellings. So, we have one word to define a category, that has two chameleons. Henceforth, we’re calling them homonyms, just like the subtitle of the book, a confusing collection of hilarious homonyms and sound-alike sentences.

Some of the sentences make sense and could be used in everyday life and some of them are wacky situations that could never happen. Witness this sentence: the children scarfed the mousee. In this case ‘scarfed’ refers to the slang word for eating fast and ‘mousee’ is the delicious chocolate dessert. Now witness: the children scarfed the mouse. When you say them aloud they sound the same. However, in the second sentence ‘scarfed’ is used as the past tense of putting a scarf on, and moose means the large antlered creature in the forest.

Now, put a clever illustration against each sentence showing what the children are doing and you have an idea of the mischief and fun that No Reading Allowed can create. Some of the pages have two different sets of wordplay and some of the pages have one larger illustration. Either way, you cut it the book is clever, frustrating for some, and will lead to kids talking about grammar.

They will certainly do so in ways that will be frustrating for the people they’re speaking to and hilarious for the person speaking. “I meant ‘weigh’, not ‘way’ when I said that”, for example. In class one time a student made a pitcher/pitcher comment. He was making a baseball charade movement, but ‘meant’ to illustrate a pitcher, from which to pour water. He thought it was hilarious. His classmates did not and I admired the student for knowing the difference. When I tried to illustrate that he had pointed out what a homophone is he simply brushed me off and tried to make another joke.

No Reading Allowed is a book that kids will read by themselves if they’re old enough to get the joke. It’s also a cleverly illustrated book that teaches new vocabulary (homophones!) in a way that parents and kids can experience together. The reading level for the sentences is not that high. They’re mainly simple sentences and those kids in third grade should be able to read most of them. Understanding the sentences without assistance will be challenging. There are some words like tapir, queue, manatee and a couple of others are ones that they’ll need assistance with.

If those students break the words down into syllables then they’ll be able to catch the joke. For example, those really, super clever kids will hear and say ‘manatee’, like the sea mammals and be able to compare that to ‘man, a tea’. The illustrations in No Reading Allowed are smart too and really drive the points home. The book is even more clever when you realize that the last word in the book’s title is also a homonym and puts the book in a different light when you switch them. If you can get through this book and list the other sentence with its homonym friend then you need to call Will Shortz, the puzzle master over at NPR.

There are affiliate links in this post.