No Sam! and the City of Scoundrels

by Drew Daywalt, Mike Lowery (Illustrator)

In this third installment of Sam’s adventures, the precocious pug heads to New York City, where encounters involving a werewolf, a giant fish monster, and a minotaur create comic chaos. Drew Daywalt’s diary-style storytelling and Mike Lowery’s comic panels and wacky drawings invite readers to follow the adventure through both words and pictures.

Big Idea

Writers and illustrators control how quickly a story feels by choosing what to show, what to tell, and where to pause. Sam’s outrageous city adventure helps young readers explore how pictures, voice, and story structure work together to create excitement and humor.

Discussion Questions

1.How does experiencing the adventure through Sam’s diary affect what we notice? What might another character describe differently?
2.Which moment felt fastest to you, and which made you stop and look? What did the words or pictures do to create that feeling?
3.How does New York City help make Sam’s adventure exciting or surprising? How might the story change in a quiet neighborhood?
4.Choose an encounter involving the werewolf, giant fish monster, or minotaur. What makes that encounter funny, surprising, or a little suspenseful?
5.What do Sam’s words and reactions suggest about his personality? Which details helped you form your ideas?

Lesson Plan

⏱ 40 minutes📦 A copy of the book, document camera or other way to display pages, four-panel paper templates, pencils, crayons or markers, and chart paper

Learning Goals

Identify Sam, the city setting, and important events using evidence from words and illustrations.
Explain how a panel, picture detail, or brief line of text can make a moment feel fast or slow.
Create a logically sequenced four-panel narrative with an opening, anticipation, action, and reaction.
Use drawing, dictation, or writing to communicate Sam’s point of view.
Read or perform a comic with purposeful changes in speed and pauses.

Activity Steps

1.Read aloud selected pages from Sam’s city adventure, displaying the illustrations. Invite students to identify a moment that feels quick and a moment that invites a longer look.
2.Model an original, clearly labeled imagined episode: Sam notices something unusual near a city street. Sketch four boxes labeled Notice, Wait, Whoosh!, and React.
3.Have students choose the werewolf, giant fish monster, or minotaur for their imagined encounter. Ask them to tell a partner what Sam notices, what happens, and how he reacts.
4.Students draw their four-panel diary comics. Encourage a close-up or extra visual detail in the waiting panel and a short caption or sound effect in the action panel; accept dictated captions and invented spelling.
5.Partners read their comics aloud, pausing at anticipation and changing speed for action. Listeners point to one choice that affected the pace.
6.Invite students to revise one panel or caption, then share how their revision made the moment feel faster, slower, or funnier.

Standards Connections

ELA: RL.K.3 / RL.1.3 / RL.2.3 — Identify characters, settings, and events; describe characters and their responses to events at the appropriate grade level.
ELA: RL.K.7 / RL.1.7 / RL.2.7 — Use illustrations and words to develop understanding of characters, setting, and events.
ELA: W.K.3 / W.1.3 / W.2.3 — Create narratives through drawing, dictation, and writing, with increasingly developed event sequences and details.
ELA: SL.K.1 / SL.1.1 / SL.2.1 — Participate in collaborative conversations, listen to others, and build on shared observations.
Art: Visual literacy — Explain how panel arrangement, visual details, and space communicate action and emotion.

Pace-Write-Read Study with Pace-Write It!

PART 2: PACE-WRITE-READ WORKSHOP Sam’s New York City adventure offers young writers an approachable way to study pacing: the feeling that a story is moving quickly, slowing down, or holding its breath. Its diary format, comic panels, and wacky drawings give children more than one route into the story. A reader can follow the events through language while also studying expressions, action, and visual details. Read selected pages twice—first for enjoyment, then to ask, “What made us rush ahead or stop and look?” The werewolf, giant fish monster, and minotaur provide memorable material for exploring anticipation, surprise, and comic reactions. Rather than teaching that short text always means fast reading, help children test how words and images work together: a nearly wordless picture might invite a long look, while a brief exclamation might prompt a quick burst of sound. Students can borrow these storytelling possibilities without copying the book’s wording. Use the cycle Pace–Write–Read: notice a pacing choice, try a similar technique in an original Sam-inspired diary comic, and read the result to a partner. For kindergarteners, drawing and oral storytelling can carry the work; first and second graders can add captions, dialogue, and purposeful punctuation. The goal is not more writing, but more intentional choices about what readers experience next.

Element	How to notice or teach it in the novel
1. Pacing	Compare two selected moments in Sam’s city adventure and ask where students read quickly or linger. Connect their responses to visible choices such as panel size, text amount, or detailed drawings rather than assuming every action scene reads fast.
2. Plot	Map the events of a selected creature encounter using beginning, next, and ending. Ask which event changes Sam’s situation and makes readers want to continue.
3. Prosody	Read a short passage from Sam’s diary in two ways: evenly and with expressive phrasing. Let children explain which voice better matches the pictures and mood.
4. Word	Choose an action word from a selected passage and act it out. Try a gentler or stronger alternative and discuss how that substitution changes the imagined speed of Sam’s movement.
5. Concept	Describe the story’s premise as a precocious pug experiencing a monster-filled city adventure. Ask how combining an ordinary pet, a real city, and fantastical creatures creates possibilities for surprise.
6. Voice & Worldview	Find a diary comment or reaction that reveals how Sam interprets a strange event. Invite children to consider whether another observer would see the same situation in the same way.
7. Point of View	Use the diary format to ask whose experience guides the reader through New York City. Have children retell one small moment from the perspective of a creature Sam encounters.
8. Setting & Place	Identify words and pictured details that establish New York City. Discuss how the city surroundings affect the action, then imagine the same encounter in a very different place.
9. Original Characters	Study how Sam’s pug appearance and distinctive reactions make him recognizable. Have students invent one original city bystander with a clear visual feature and a particular response to the commotion.
10. Dialogue	Where characters speak, compare their spoken words with Sam’s diary narration. Ask how a brief exchange can show a reaction immediately instead of explaining it afterward.
11. Details	Invite children to spot a small detail in Lowery’s drawings that adds information about Sam or a creature encounter. Ask whether noticing it makes them pause, laugh, or reconsider the scene.
12. Descriptions	Compare what the text tells about a creature with what the illustration shows. Let students describe the giant fish monster in a few words, then decide which information a drawing could communicate instead.
13. Firsts	Examine the first appearance of a selected creature and discuss what readers learn immediately. Students can plan what to reveal first in their own imagined encounter and what to save for the next panel.
14. Immediacy & Engagement	Find a moment that makes students feel close to Sam’s experience. Ask whether a close view, an expressive reaction, or a line of narration helps create that feeling.
15. Story Scenes, Summaries & Structures	Compare a passage that recounts events with panels that let readers watch an event unfold. Use the diary structure to discuss when a writer can move ahead and when an important moment deserves a scene.
16. Tension / Suspense / Surprise	Pause before a creature-related reveal and ask what students predict using available clues. After reading on, distinguish the feeling of waiting from the surprise of discovering what actually happens.
17. Flashback, Flash-Forward, Cliffhanger	Check selected pages for a look backward, a hint about later events, or an unresolved stopping point; do not assume all three appear. If one is absent, model it as a new storytelling option for an imagined Sam diary entry.
18. Page Turns and Chapter Breaks	Inspect what information appears immediately before and after a page turn or section break. Ask whether the stopping place delays a discovery, changes the scene, or simply organizes Sam’s account.
19. Pace & Creativity	Have children sketch the same imagined Sam-and-minotaur moment in one panel and then in three. Compare how the additional panels create room for anticipation, detail, or a reaction.
20. Play	Use the book’s playful combination of a pug, city life, and fantastical creatures as an invitation to experiment. Children can invent a harmless, silly complication for Sam and test two different endings.
21. Performance	Partners perform a selected sequence using a narrator voice and character reactions. Encourage them to use pauses and changes in speed while keeping their interpretation grounded in the page.
22. Personality	Collect evidence of Sam’s personality from his comments, choices, and pictured expressions. Ask students to show that personality in a new reaction rather than merely labeling him with an adjective.
23. Humor	Choose a moment students find funny and examine what creates the joke: an unexpected event, a visual detail, a reaction, or a contrast between words and pictures. Try pausing before the funny part to test comic timing.
24. Pause	Give students quiet looking time during a visually rich or surprising moment. Explain that a pause can help readers notice a joke, understand an expression, or anticipate what comes next.
25. Poetry / Poetic Devices	Look for sound play, repeated sounds, comparisons, or sound effects in the selected pages, noting only devices actually present. As an extension, children can invent an alliterative caption or sound effect for Sam’s monster encounter.
26. Repetition	Search for a repeated word, visual feature, or kind of reaction in Sam’s adventure. If students find one, discuss how the return creates familiarity and whether a change makes it surprising.
27. Rhythm	Tap once for each panel while reading a short sequence, then notice where the reading needs a longer beat. Connect that changing rhythm to action, waiting, and Sam’s reactions.
28. Punctuation	Inspect punctuation in a short selection and read it aloud according to its cues. Students can test how changing an imagined Sam caption from a statement to a question or exclamation changes its delivery.
29. Questions	Pause during an encounter and invite students to ask what they genuinely want to know next. Discuss how an unanswered question can encourage a reader to continue through Sam’s diary.
30. Compare-Contrast	Compare two of the book’s creature encounters using Sam’s responses and the way each is presented. Ask whether the encounters feel equally fast or funny, and request evidence from the pages.
31. Objects	Choose an object actually visible in a city scene and discuss whether it establishes place, supports action, or adds humor. Students can give one ordinary city object a useful role in an original Sam episode.
32. Threes	Use the werewolf, giant fish monster, and minotaur as a familiar set of three for a planning exercise, without claiming the book follows a rule-of-three structure. Have children try two similar imagined reactions followed by a different third reaction.
33. Lists	Invite students to make an invented diary list of things Sam might notice in this monster-filled city adventure. Compare a quick list with a fully illustrated scene to explore how each handles story time.
34. White Space & Negative Space	Examine the space around panels, text, and figures in a selected spread. Ask how that space helps children follow the reading order, focus on Sam, or separate one moment from another.
35. Art & Graphics	Read a selected sequence first by studying only the pictures, then add the words. Discuss what Lowery’s expressions, movement cues, and layouts contribute to the adventure.
36. Interactives & Gamification	Turn rereading into a classroom detective game: find a clue about setting, a personality detail, and a pacing choice. Present this as a teacher-created activity rather than a claim that the book includes game features.
37. Placement	Trace the reading path through a selected page, noticing where captions, figures, and any speech balloons sit. Ask what readers encounter first and how moving an element could change a reveal.
38. Form	Discuss how the combination of diary writing and comics allows Sam to recount events while pictures show them. Let children turn one imagined diary sentence into a panel and compare the results.
39. Dummy	Explain that a dummy is a rough practice version of a book. Children can fold paper into a miniature Sam-inspired diary and test which page turn best separates anticipation from a creature reveal.
40. Passion	Ask which part of Sam’s adventure students most want to draw, discuss, or reread. Use that enthusiasm to help each child choose an encounter worth developing carefully in an original comic.

Pace-Write It!

Sam’s Monster-Moment Remix — 20 minutes Materials: The book, paper folded into four boxes, pencils, and crayons. Minutes 0–4 — PACE: Revisit a short sequence involving the werewolf, giant fish monster, or minotaur. Ask, “Where do we wait? Where does the action feel quick?” Identify one visible choice that contributes to the effect. Minutes 4–6 — PLAN: Explain that students will invent a new episode, not reproduce an event from the book. Each child chooses one of those creatures and orally plans four moments: Sam notices something in New York City; he waits or looks closer; something surprising happens; he reacts. Minutes 6–13 — WRITE: Children draw the four moments as a diary comic, adding captions, speech, or dictated words as appropriate. Challenge them to make the waiting panel invite a careful look and the action panel communicate a quick burst of movement. Minutes 13–18 — READ: Partners perform their comics, changing speed and pausing deliberately. Each listener identifies one place that felt slow or fast and points to the words or picture choices responsible. Minutes 18–20 — REVISE: Students change one detail, caption, or panel to strengthen the intended pace. Finish with the oral reflection, “I helped my reader slow down or speed up by _____.”

Classroom Activities

Sam’s Slow-Fast City Diary

Children create an imagined diary episode in which Sam encounters one of the book’s fantastical creatures in New York City. Using a four-panel comic, they stretch a moment of anticipation, show a burst of action, and finish with a funny reaction, discovering how pictures and words can change a reader’s pace.

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