You want your class to fall for words, and you'd rather do it with a story than a list on the board. These eight books each take one machine apart and show your class how it runs. Idioms taken literally. Homophones. A misheard word. An invented one. Pick the one that matches whatever your class is stuck on this week, read it, and set it down finished. They also sit at wildly different levels on purpose, from a beginning reader sounding out an early reader to a fluent reader who wants a whole novel, so every child in the room can be in this idea at once at their own level. Any single book here does the whole job.
Every book here has to do one thing: show your class an actual mechanism in the language, not just use nice words. So each one is a different machine. Amelia Bedelia is idioms taken literally. The King Who Rained is homophones, almost purely. Miss Alaineus is a mondegreen, a word misheard and cut into the wrong pieces. Frindle is an invented word and what happens when enough people agree to use it. Max's Words is word order and how a sentence is assembled. The Phantom Tollbooth is puns and idioms at full volume for a fluent reader. That's the spine. One thing worth naming, since nobody else will: these split into stories with wordplay in them and vocabulary exercises wearing a story's coat. Max's Words, Amelia Bedelia, Miss Alaineus, Frindle and The Phantom Tollbooth are stories first, and you could read them for the plot alone. The Word Collector and The Boy Who Loved Words are closer to celebrations of language with a thin plot around them, and The King Who Rained has no plot at all, it's a joke per spread. Neither kind is better. But if you hand a plot-hungry child The Word Collector expecting a story, you'll get a shrug, and it's fair for you to know that before it happens.