Oh Shucks
A review of Yuck, Stuck in the Muck by Corinne Demas
By Julia A. Keirns
My grandkids and I love to read this book.
“Yuck, Stuck in the Muck” is written by Corinne Demas and illustrated by Laura Rader. As I read this book for the umpteenth time, I was trying to decide what really is the message or main idea of this book. I believe this book was written with a mission of simply being fun with new words. How many times in real life do we use the words yuck, stuck, muck or guck? These particular words expose children to a new sound and teach them how to sound out a hard “k” sound and then also how to rhyme and add all the different beginning sounds. The book is fun to read and funny to look at.
The illustrator has done a wonderful job with making the book fun and exciting. There are large colorful pictures of duck, dog, Chuck, donkey, Sue and Sam and his truck all getting stuck in the swampy muck. Well, all except for duck who watches from the sidelines! I think the drawings almost look sort of like water-color painting with lots of dark black thick outlines. Very simple and colorful. This is one of the books on my own shelf that the grandkids have always liked to read. That is why I chose this one off of my shelf.
This book is a level 1 Scholastic Reader which contains short sentences and easy words to sound out. It helps develop phonetic awareness skills and contains fun words the kids remember. I have always enjoyed reading books that rhyme. That is probably my favorite part of this book because so many of the words do rhyme. There are more words that end in -uck than we realize. Some good and some bad…