Using I Wanna Iguana By Karen Kaufman Orloff in the Classroom
The book is part of a three-book series designed to teach perspective and voice in persuasive writing. The first book, I Wanna Iguana, follows a kid named Danny who is trying to convince his parents to get him an iguana. Each chapter ends with a parent's response, so the whole thing reads like a back-and-forth argument on paper. It's been used in elementary schools for years because it does exactly what it says it does. The core technique here is the epistolary format. You have two voices fighting over the same topic, and the student has to read both sides and understand how each one works. That's it. It sounds simple, and honestly, it is. But most teachers I know rush through it and miss the part that actually matters. What you're teaching with this book is not just that a kid can argue. You're teaching them that different readers require different strategies. Danny changes his approach chapter by chapter. In the beginning he uses emotional appeals. By chapter three he's bringing up practical concerns his parents raised and answering them directly. The book models argumentative revision in real time, which is something you don't find a lot of in kids' books at this level.
I ran into a problem once where a student was stuck on a unit test about persuasive techniques and kept mixing up ethos, pathos, and logos. Nothing I explained clicked. I put I Wanna Iguana By Karen Kaufman Orloff on the desk in front of him and asked him to highlight every time Danny switched tactics between his letter and his parents' reply. Within twenty minutes he could name the difference between an emotional appeal and a logical one because he was looking at it in context, not from a diagram on a worksheet. I still use that trick occasionally. It works about seventy percent of the time with this age group. The thing most educators don't realize is that the book's real value isn't the iguana premise. It's the parental responses. Those are where the lesson lives. Each parent reply models counter-argument structure. The mother addresses the kid's points directly, raises a new concern, and then offers a conditional compromise. The father is shorter and blunter but still follows a pattern. If you skip analyzing the parent responses, you're only getting half the exercise. Another thing people miss: the series progression matters. The second book, I Wanna Snake, shifts to a more mature argument where the child is dealing with a science project deadline instead of a pet request. The third, I Want Dolphin, introduces research-based persuasion. If you're only doing the first one and wondering why your students aren't transitioning to structured essays, it's because you stopped at the entry point. The three books are a scaffold, not three standalone stories.
Now, the limitations. The humor in this book dates a little. Some of the jokes land differently now than they did twenty years ago, and a small subset of classrooms will have kids who find the iguana premise off-putting for whatever reason. You'll also find that the format works best with students who already have basic writing skills. If someone can't construct a complete sentence yet, this unit will frustrate them more than help them. In those cases, pairing it with a simpler oral discussion about asking for things first tends to work better. Download links for the book itself are standard retail channels. Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Scholastic, that sort of thing. If you need a classroom set, Scholastic usually has bulk pricing that cuts the per-unit cost significantly. Educational distributors sometimes carry discounted copies too, though the selection varies by region. The book runs about forty pages and takes roughly one class period to read through with discussion. Plan for at least two additional sessions if you're doing the full persuasive writing unit that usually accompanies it. Don't try to compress it into a single day unless you're only skimming. Students who get something out of this material are the ones who actually sit with the text and talk through the back-and-forth.
Get the Full Details
