Tracking the structure of "Goodnight Moon"
Every time I read "Goodnight Moon" to the littles, I find myself mentally tracking the callbacks to elements introduced in the beginning of the story. I knew it largely followed an order of "introduce the thing...later say goodnight to the thing in the same order", but there were also new introductions in the second half. For example, "Red Balloon" and "Cow Jumping over the moon" swap order in the goodnight section. Furthermore, we don't get formally introduced to "Clocks" and "socks" until the last third of the book. So I decided to graph it out in case anyone else was curious about the structure like me.
Overall, it was closer to a linear repetition than I thought, but there's a few new elements sprinkled into the goodnight section to keep it exciting. My personal favorite is "Goodnight Nobody" making a late appearance, followed by the return to callbacks with Mush".
This is moderate step up in complexity compared to our other favorite book "Chicka Chicka Boom Boom", which retains a more rigid callback structure.