Tricksters. Once There Was a Coyote

For today's contribution to this week of coyote stories, I wanted to share this Dolch reader: Once There Was a Coyote which is by Marguerite Dolch.

Long before there were "leveled readers," Edward Dolch (1889-1961) devised this system for teaching reading with very limited vocabulary; you can read about the Dolch Word List at Wikipedia. Marguerite Dolch was Edward Dolch's wife, and together they wrote over 100 educational readers for children based on this vocabulary-driven system.

I really appreciate the use of folktales as part of the Dolch reading approach. This Coyote book is part of a series of Once There Was... books about different animals in folktale traditions. At the Internet Archive, you can also find Once There Was a Dog, but they don't have the other books in the series; there are seven of these books total, in addition to the many other Dolch series.

You will find 8 Native American stories about Coyote here, but no indications are given as to sources or specific storytelling traditions. After I finish my trickster indexing project, I will return to this book to see if I can provide some source conjectures for the books that Marguerite Dolch consulted.

The illustrations are by Carl and Mary Hauge. Here is Coyote with Rattlesnake, and look at Coyote: he's put a rattle on his tail too! 

As you can probably guess, things do not turn out well for Coyote in this attempt to imitate Rattlensnake! 

So, without bibliography and notes, these Coyote stories are not good for research, but if you want to share something with a very young reader, that is who they are written for!