Little Ducks Go

A Bank Street Best Children’s Book of the Year

A walk in town turns into a harrowing adventure for six little ducklings in this Guided Reading Level C Book. 

Following their mother down the street, the baby ducklings are swept up in a gush of water and washed down a storm drain.  “Quack!” says their mother.  “Cheep cheep!” call the babies.  

Sailing through the sewer pipes, the little ducks go, as mother duck chases them from drain to drain, trying to keep them calm.  When her quacks attract the attention of a kind-hearted man, the little ducks are rescued!  

With warm, nostalgic watercolor paintings, Caldecott Medalist Emily Arnold McCully takes readers on a journey, chasing the little ducklings and their mother through the streets of a small town and a busier city.  Perfect for young readers, this is a satisfying story of accidental adventure– with a happy ending.  

The award-winning  I Like to Read® series focuses on guided reading levels A through G, based upon Fountas and Pinnell standards.  Acclaimed author-illustrators–including winners of Caldecott, Theodor Seuss Geisel, and Coretta Scott King honors—create original, high quality illustrations that support comprehension of simple text and are fun for kids to read with parents, teachers, or on their own!  

For readers who’ve mastered basic sight words already,  Level C books feature slightly longer sentences, suitable for mid-to-late kindergarten readers, and introduce a wider range of high-frequency vocabulary words. Move onto Level D once you’ve mastered them

“This tale of duckling rescue has a surprisingly large cast for a 32-page picture book.

There’s mother duck and her six ducklings, of course. There’s the boy who stops traffic when the mother duck runs across the street after the ducklings are washed down through a grating. There’s the middle-aged man who shows up with a net to fish the baby ducklings out of the storm drain. There’s a little red-haired girl—his daughter?—who holds the ducklings in a cardboard box as he drives the ducks to a nearby pond in his car. She waves to them as they swim safely away. Even a neighborhood dog stops by to provide moral support. Skeptics may roll their eyes at the idea that it takes a village to save a duck, but they will probably still be charmed by the pictures. It would be easy to believe that the energetic pen-and-watercolor illustrations were sketched from life as McCully followed ducks around her neighborhood. The story may seem too sweet to be true, even though it resembles a real-life incident in Montauk, N.Y., that was also the subject of Lucky Ducklings, by Eva Moore and illustrated by Nancy Carpenter (2013).Very few readers will remain unmoved as that mother duck runs from grating to grating, trying to catch a glimpse of her children; everyone loves a duck.”

-Kirkus