Earl and Pearl are working to build a garden, while the chicken begins to cause issues with the gardening process. As Earl and Pearl go through the process of digging, planting and weeding the chicken is constantly there clucking and scratching. They continually tell the chicken to "shoo", but the chicken always comes back. It wasn't until a grasshopper came to eat the vegetables that Earl and Pearl loved the chicken being there as the chicken scared the grasshoppers away. Genre: Picture Book ( )

This book is about an annoying chicken that clucks and scratches the dirt. The two characters are trying to grow pumpkins and grasshoppers starts trying to eat their pumpkins and they just keep schewing the chicken away. The chicken is only trying to help keep the pumpkins free of pests so they can grow. This book has a good moral and it is to never give up.

CC Youth Reader and several ILL

26 months - this is a cute, fun story that we will have to read again when O starts to read. Lots of repetition on vocabulary yet actually manages to have a story. ( )

This a fun beginning reader book. It's a simple story, but very well done. It's not quite a "sing-song" style book, but there is enough repetition and predictability to make it fun to read together and to do some call and response on the repeated phrases. The cartoon-style illustrations are great fun, and they are pretty true to the text. I think this can help early readers get contextual clues for unknown words. When we read, "Earl dug the garden. Pearl planted the seeds," we see exactly that in the pictures by the words. All the characters look happy in the illustrations, and it's fun to see them all get along in the end! The pictures of the garden and the home are full of wonderful detail.