It’s a bit dense and dry for many students to read it by choice, though I guess that really curious future electrical engineer might.  The information is sound, and fairly clearly stated, with diagrams and analogies and references to common everyday examples to help illustrate the principles involved.  Probably best suited to the middle school level.

It’s not something kids are going to choose to read on their own, but it could be useful to teachers for civics lessons.  It’s a series of short stories set in an imaginary town where the city council keeps setting laws rather hastily, without considering all the implications of their decisions.  As ramifications arise, they are required to consider why certain rights must be maintained.  It may be a bit pedantic, but the scenarios are such that they illustrate rather significant civic principles in terms students can relate to.

It’s obviously written as an early-reader non-fiction, as the text is rather stilted and the information rather shallow.  The part I found a bit jarring was the bits in the “Good to Know” blurbs that rather disjointedly referenced the United States:  when discussing the flag of Guatemala, and the quetzal that is depicted upon it as the national bird, they add a sentence stating that the Eagle is the national bird of the United States;  when describing the many volcanoes that make up the terrain of Guatemala, the blurb tosses in that, “There are volcanoes in the United States too.  Most of them are in Hawaii and Alaska.”  I am guessing that this is somehow intended to build connections between American readers and the country they are reading about, but it felt out of place and unnecessary and disruptive to learning about Guatemala, the topic of the book.  Wouldn’t it be more useful to leave it to the readers to build their own connections?

A solid choice for those readers who enjoy both bugs and random facts.  It’s illustrated with a combination of color photos and cartoon-like drawings.  It’s organized by type of insect, with brief blurbs of interesting info.  Accessible for those kids who like to turn to a page randomly and read about something that caught their eye, without being overwhelmed by the need to delve into a long sequential narrative.

Boy howdy, this book is full of cowboy lingo (properly defined in a specialized glossary), as it tells the story of a black cowboy from Pendleton, OR, who wowed the crowds even while facing the prejudices of his day.  It’s a picture book biography that culminates with the bucking bronco competition of the 1911 Pendleton Round-Up.  After the first Native American competitor disqualified himself on a tricky ride, and the white competitor road an exciting ride where some spectators saw a disqualification, but the judges said they didn’t, George was the third and final competitor.  His spectacular ride had the crowd of 15,000 spectators roaring their approval.  But when the judges announced the white competitor as first place winner, and George as second place, the crowd went silent before erupting into boos.  Though the judges decision was final, the local lawman snatched George’s hat off his head, cut it up into pieces and started selling off pieces to the crowd at $5 each, and in the end they collected more money for George than the value of the official prize, and George was declared the People’s Champion.  The story is well-told, accompanied by oil paint illustrations, and several pages of further information are offered in the back, to fill out the biographies of the main characters, and to share the difficulties of doing research about a time when not many records were kept on ordinary folks.  A good choice.

I chose this book based on the title and the appealing cover, and then when I did a quick flip through the pages, I worried that, at 70 pages, it was too long, with too much too much text per page for elementary students to stick with.  But then I started reading, and decided it’s a good choice after all.  Though there is a lot of text per page, it is accompanied by engaging cartoon like illustrations to draw the reader in, and it is written in a very personable voice that makes it feel like the author is just chatting with the reader.  It is accessible and interesting, and I ended up finishing it all in one sitting before going to bed, even though I didn’t think I was originally going to be that interested.  Besides being interesting, it’s actually relevant to things students encounter in their personal lives: mosquito bites, lice, athlete’s foot, poison ivy…

A good, thorough, look at the research being done about our Moon.  It begins with the 1969 moon landing, takes a brief dip into ancient theories and myths, and then continues on through the information gained from the Apollo missions and on through current studies being investigated, before going on to speculate about future studies and the prediction that humans will return to the moon within the next 50 years.  The text is accompanied by beautiful photos and artists’ renderings and diagrams.  My one critique for the layout would be that in more than one place two-page sidebars interrupt the main flow of the text, so that a reader finishes one page mid-sentences, has to skip ahead two pages to continue and then backtrack so as to not miss out on the other information.  It seems to me that could have been better planned/organized.  As much as I liked the book, I am at a K-4 school, and I believe the information is a bit too dense for my age group.  I would really recommend this for a middle school or high school library.

It’s a beautiful story, beautifully illustrated.  Inspired by a true story of the transformation of San Diego’s East Village, the story begins with a little girl who likes to paint and color and draw:  the opening page is a rather dark, very gray drawing of an urban neighborhood, with the one bright spot on the page coming from a peek into the little girl’s bedroom window, hung with her artwork.  On her way to and from school in this rather gray neighborhood, we see her passing out her bright, colorful drawings as gifts to those she passes by, and she tapes one to the side of a building.  Then one day she meets an artist studying the picture she hung upon the wall.  They introduce themselves, he shares his brushes and paint, and together they begin painting a mural.  As they work, more and more neighbors come to join in and the project grows until the whole neighborhood is beautiful.  Throughout the story, the tone of the illustrations gradually change, adding more and more color, until the final page is full of color, with a lone gray building on the far edge of the page, inviting the reader to imagine to the project going on and on.

This really has quite a substantial amount of information for a Rookie Reader.  Each two-page spread is dedicated to another idea for practical things individuals can do to help keep the planet clean.  It begins with a page dedicated to “invisible” garbage, encouraging kids to walk or ride bikes to places nearby to avoid contributing to air pollution and taking showers instead of baths to avoid wasting water.  It goes on to suggest growing one’s own food, composting, using reusable containers, donating things you’ve finished with, recycling, etc.  It ends by sharing some real-life stories about ways some creative things others have done to get their communities involved in this effort.

This is a beautiful and inspiring book.  The poem is a celebration of triumphs.  Even as it discusses atrocities in our history, it honors those who survived those atrocities, as well as those who didn’t.  The illustrations are stunning, full of humanity.  The text of the poem, combined with the illustrations, evokes emotion and sparks curiosity. In the back of the book are informational pages, sharing names and brief biographical blurbs of those depicted, as well as short explanations for various historical moments mentioned in the poem.  It is a book to springboard readers into further explorations.

What a beautiful book to celebrate one of humanity’s great scientific achievements.  The end pages at the beginning and end of the book provide just-the-facts context, with diagrams, sequences of events, data, and further information about America’s first trip to the moon.  In between, the story is told.  The text is poetic, and the illustrations help to convey the wonder and humanity of this shared experience to readers who are too young to have shared in it themselves.  A great book to inspire future scientists.

It’s a bit of an odd book.  It its way, it is a book of triumphing over loneliness, I guess.  It tells about a lonely turtle who knows only his own shadow, but decides one day to crawl out of his shell and make renovations to it.  What starts out as a new paint job leads to building a deck with a fireplace, and then planting a garden with a pond, and eventually moving on to building an entire town on the back of his shell.  This draws a whole community of other critters who decide to move in and Turtle isn’t lonely anymore.  The artwork is aiming for child-like, and is really quite successful at that, but the problem with children’s artwork is that it’s often difficult to see what they are actually trying to convey, and in that regard it failed to serve the telling of the story, I thought.

It’s fine, but not as good as I hoped it would be.  For one thing, since it tells me that the telescope came first, shouldn’t the subtitle be “from the telescope to the x-ray”?  The information is brief blurbs about assorted human inventions related to the ways we see, organized by topic, and roughly chronologically.  The accompanying illustrations are cartoonish.  There were a few confusing bits:  each two-page spread, dedicated to a particular topic, has some kind of connect-the-dots trail running through the illustrations, and it took me a few pages to figure that indicates the reading path if you want the information chronologically; if you read following the typical left-to-right, top-to-bottom order, it sometimes comes off a bit disjointed.  There are a few times the illustrations seem a bit disconnected too:  next to the blurb describing the first x-ray, in 1895, as one the inventor took of his wife’s hand, the illustration shows a chest x-ray being taken of a woman wearing shorts? In 1895? Really?

It’s got all the pleasing characteristics of other Llama Llama books, including rhythm and rhyme and fun illustrations, as well as a worthwhile message it’s trying to convey to to young children — in this case the importance of everyone lending a hand with the tidying up chores. When mama ask little Llama to stop playing and to make his bed, he starts off shaking his head, because all he wants to do is play, until he takes some time to image what life would be like of mama also refused to clean and just wanted to play. The problem lies with the lack of any sign of dad in this scenario, and the implication that if Llama doesn’t help all the cleaning responsibilities would fall upon his apron-clad mama: it just smacks of 1950s stereotypes.

If you have a lot of fans of the Froggy books, it might be worth purchasing this one to expand your collection, especially if you’ve also got classes who do pumpkin patch field trips, which is what this one is about. It tells about Froggy and his friends searching for pumpkins as part of a pumpkin picking contest, with prizes for assorted traits (biggest, smallest, prettiest, etc.) And even after dropping his pumpkin at the end of the search, smashing it to bits, Froggy still gets a prize — for ugliest. I’m just a bit tired of the whole everybody-gets-a-prize thing.

It’s more or less your basic, traditional, retelling of he There Little Pigs, with all the usual huffing and puffing and chinny chin chins. What lends this one its unique character is that the three little pigs declare themselves to be obsessed with the desire to be superheroes, to the point of dressing like superheroes. When they set off from home and first arrive in Fairyland, they hear how the local wolf has been tormenting all the local residents. So when they catch the wolf after he climbs down the chimney of the brick house, they turn out to be superheroes to all their neighbors.

My only real beef with this book is the way it short-changes Gertie in the title. The book is all about Manny and Gertie, who spend every Saturday battling imaginary monsters together all around town. Until, in the midst of some of their imaginings in the park, they notice the way litter is impacting the whole park (and especially the turtles in the pond). So they set their efforts into battling the real monsters: litter bugs. As others in the park notice their efforts, they pitch end to lend a hand and everyone benefits. A little cheesy perhaps, but a good message. I just don’t know why Gertie gets no credit?

This story is really series of children introducing themselves as they work together in a garden. Each student has a different challenge s/he describes (diabetes, autism, wheelchairs, blind, deaf, turrets…), as well as things that help them cope with those challenges. Each introduction ends with a question that leads into the next child, creating a sense of connectedness despite their differences, as well as inviting children to connect themselves to the children in the story. The author ends by drawing an analogy between the children and the garden in which they’ve been working, pointing out that it is the differences which enrich both the garden and our world.

It’s a picture book that starts to introduce young children to literature’s use of tangible symbols to represent intangible ideas. It tells us about a hippo who has a big, black, heavy block that she’s been carrying around for quite some time. Each day she drags it with her to the park where she sits on it. Then along comes a happy, dancing alligator surrounded by a cloud of butterflies, who sits with her day after day. When invited to the ocean, our pig friend is concerned that her block is too heavy to carry that far, but her new alligator friend says he and his butterflies can help. Along the way, and during their time beside the sea, hippo tells about an old friend she misses, who has gone away, and finds that her block is shrinking. She says she’ll always have it, but alligator says he’ll help carry it when necessary.

I appreciate the idea of a picture-book biography of someone students might not know about, and one that encourages exercise and healthy eating, but I’ve got several problems with this book. Right off the bat, it begins by telling us that he was a bit of a sickly child, skinny and feeble and frail, and then we turn the page and the next sentence says, “But Friedrich survived.” That seemed like a big jump, as nothing in being described as skinny and frail had seemed life-threatening. My main objection is hidden in the author’s note at the very back of the book, rarely read by children, when the author admits that the subject of his book was known for self-promotion, and there is much doubt over the authenticity of events he presented in the main body of the text as fact.

It’s got a good sturdy binding, and a solid amount of well-organized information packed into a book designed for early readers. Too often the effort to keep the text simple results in limited information. This book finds a good balance. The chapters make sense. The use of non-fiction text features, such as charts, glossary, table of contents, etc. is done well, rather than seeming like a forced add-on, as is also a frequent pitfall of early-reader non-fiction.

I kind of want to give it a Not Recommended rating, but I’m afraid my personal biases might be shading my opinion a bit, so I shall soften my opinion to an Alternate Purchase. I know it’s trying to honor the imagination of youth. It tells of a boy who wakes up one morning not wanting to be a boy, but to be a bear, wild and free. He proceeds to move through his day protesting any and all of the usual constraints on humans that are interfering with his desire to be wild and free, including the need to wear clothes and shoes. Mom manages to convince him of the benefits of clothes during cold weather, but sends him off to school with his shoes in his backpack instead of on his feet, where continues to protest the rules. The illustrations show him throwing things, including chairs, and hitting other students in line in his imagined bear state. As someone who deals with too much bear-like behavior from students on a regular basis, I don’t feel like I can recommend a book that encourages kids to just go with their feelings about such things.

It’s a celebration of the little, ordinary joys of everyday life: family, community, memories, traditions, etc. Told from the perspective of a young girl, she tells of her father-daughter ritual each evening when her Papi comes home from work and takes her for a ride around their neighborhood on his motorcycle. Throughout their ride, she narrates about the people and places they pass, and the significance each holds in her life. The soft, sunset-ish colors in the illustration, and the nostalgic tone of the text add a sense of the cherished to the ordinary.

There has to be better options available. The opening pages tell about the mail carrier getting stung by icy wind and not letting the cold weather stop him. I’m sure the mail carriers in Florida rarely face such an issue. Later it tells about how the mail carriers sort the mail at the post office before loading it into trucks and their mailbags. Yet I am pretty sure that large urban post offices have different people doing the sorting than the ones making the deliveries, and possibly even different folks loading the trucks. I don’t believe in over-simplifying when writing for small children. Simple, straightforward text is one thing, but simplifying to the point of distorting the facts is not fair to young readers.

It’s a picture book biography of Robert Goddard, the “Father of US Rocketry.” After reading the subtitle, and knowing about the space race of the 1950s and 60s, I was surprised to learn that Mr. Goddard was born in the 1880s. It shares that because of childhood illness he was to sick to attend a regular school, but he pursued his interest in science via at-home science equipment and a subscription to Scientific American. It describes a variety of failed experiments, but demonstrates how he learned from his failures and persisted in new attempts. There was only one line I found confusing: the book refers to his successful rocket of 1926 as “rocket number four,” even though the preceding pages described his first three attempts, and then goes on to include tell us that “year after year, rocket after rocket…each failure taught Robert something new.” The message of years of persisting through failures is undermined when they suggest it was the fourth try that worked.