Reading exercise[edit]

"The Pet Goat" was composed by Siegfried "Zig" Engelmann, who had written over a thousand similar instructional exercises since the 1970s.^[1] It was anthologized in the classroom workbook Reading Mastery: Rainbow Edition, Level 2, Storybook 1. "The Pet Goat" is designed to teach students about words ending in the letter E, using the Direct Instruction (DI) teaching method. The exercise tells a story about a girl's pet goat, which her parents want to get rid of because it eats everything; the parents relent after it foils a robbery by butting the intruder, who is now "sore" (that word ending in e).^[2]