Read Alligator Pie free in the Little Reads app.
Dennis Lee's Alligator Pie is a book of nonsense rhymes for 5 year olds that only really works out loud.
It opens with Billy Batter, who has lost his cat in the laundromat. A dragon has run off with his dad. A monster has run off with his mum. By the end the dragon has gone to Saskatchewan, the monster has fallen down a wishing well, and everybody is back where they belong.
That's the shape of a lot of them. Something ridiculous happens, the rhyme carries you through it, and nobody ends up any the worse.
There's a boy who yucks at his dinner until it's taken away, then tricks his dad into letting him eat the lot. There's Psychapoo, who brushes his teeth with apple juice and rides his bicycle in bed. There's an Ookpik who is nothing but hair (if you shave him, he isn't there).
Some of them are barely about anything at all. They're just noises a mouth enjoys making. A bump on your thumb and a thump on your bum and tickle my tum in Toronto. Your reader will have that off by heart before you've read it twice.
A few are quiet ones. Windshield Wipers is a child dropping off in the back of a car with a warm coat and a deep lap nearby. The Friends is about a boy and his friend Egg, who never wants his share of the chocolate cake and hears a burglar kind of noise at bedtime. That one is very sweet.
One thing to expect. This is Canadian through and through, and half the pleasure of the place poems is the sound of Temagami and Michipicoten and Chicoutimi. Your reader won't have heard of a single one of them. It doesn't matter in the slightest while you're saying them, though you may get asked where Saskatchewan is.
These want a voice and a lap. Read one, pause before the rhyming word, and let your reader finish the line. By the third go they'll be doing the whole verse with you.
If those go down well, Garbage Delight is more of the same poet at the same pitch. There's one about being stuck half way into a jumper, one about a worm called Worm who lives in a jar and listens better than most people, and a fair few bottoms.
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