Stop Me If You've Heard This One

In reading to a classroom every week, I like to encourage questions and interaction from the kids. With both of today's books, two separate kids put their hands up early on and proceeded to predict the rest of the story in detail. Successful kids books are pretty formulaic--a moralized ending; good illustrations; onomatopoeia; scene and/or word repetition; and candy, fuzzy animals, or bodily functions--and I guess by second grade you know the drill. Predictable endings in adult books, by and large, suck. But these kids didn't seem to mind knowing how it would turn out; they were content to be along for the ride.