While flipping through channels on the TV, do you ever stop and watch, at least for a little while, those reality shows about hunting ghosts or big foot? If yes, then you have a good idea for the basis of this book series- Monster Hunters. This series is not an adrenalin racing, keep you away with nightmares at night, creepy story. It is for those readers who are not sure if cryptids exist or not, but are curious about them all the same.

Cool added feature, there is a little grey goat man at the bottom of each page that appears to ‘walk’ when the reader flips the pages.

Ben and his young helpers film an Internet Show- Discover Cryptids. “In each episode, they focused on a specific creature from myth or legend that may exist.” (4) This time it is The Pope Lick Monster aka Goat Man, near Louisville, Kentucky. Ben is there to interview a man, Chester, who puts on a yearly Halloween attraction featuring Goat Man. At the end of the interview they ask Chester to see the Goat Man costume. As it turns out, the mask is missing for some unknown reason.

Ben’s group then goes to video tape footage around the train trestle where Goat Man is known to have been seen. There they bump into a local police officer who patrols the area to kept curious sightseers away. Later, at the diner in town, the officer tells of his own personal encounter with Goat Man.

When Ben and his team go back to the trestle after dark, a teenage girl comes running down the trail screaming that she’s just seen the monster. The team splits up. One goes back to their van with the girl and the others run in the direction of the monster. The only thing they find is the missing mask. Ben and the team take the girl home. Then, they return the mask to Chester. While there Chester’s mother confesses she took the mask to prove to Chester that she can be scary, so he’ll give her a bigger part in the annual Halloween attraction.

Later, back at the hotel, as the “Discover Cryptids” team goes over the film footage, one of them points out a shadowy something clinging to the trestle. Goat Man, maybe? ” ‘Whatever it is,” he said. It’s so cool.’ “

One mistake I found in proofreading, on page 24, the character Jake was mistakenly called Jack twice, then goes back to Jake.

Brian P. Cleary once again is explaining things to young people in a way they will understand and better yet, will enjoy! This time Brian’s topic in his CATegorical series is dealing with computer coding.

Brian lets his readers know coding deals with commands in a special language, loops are repeated coded instructions, and conditionals are sets of rules dealing with “If this … then that will happen”.

“Loops and conditionals lend a big hand to code-writing pros of all ages, like YOU to write software, create fun, new games, or make your own apps or web pages!” (20-21)

Martin Goneau’s illustrations of cats personified learning about computers and coding make this a every fun and kid friendly visual learning experience. Brian P. Cleary and Martin Goneau make a great pair!

As an adult, I like page 22, the afterward, almost as much as the entire rest of the book put together. I hope students will not skip this page.

This book is part of the Symbols of American Freedom series. It states the Washington Monument was built to honor George Washington. At the time it was built in 1884, it was the tallest building in the world, at 555 feet.. The text is more about George Washington than it is about the actual monument.

There are one or two sentences on each left hand page opposite the full page picture on the right page.

It ends with www.factsurfer.com for more information.

It’s okay, but it doesn’t really live up to its title. It’s like it’s trying to spin something into more of a story than it really is. It starts out telling the story that townspeople like to share, which brings tourists to this small Alaskan town, but just a few pages in it tell us that all of that is just a legend, and that the town is really too small to have a formal government. The whole second half of the book is just telling the story of the life of a small town cat. In the end, it left me wondering what the point of it all was.

For a beginning reader, this one really packs in some solid information. I think it’s a great idea to get kids thinking early about career possibilities. This one uses a popular topic of interest as a springboard to spark young students’ curiosity about possible future careers they might have never known about — Aquatic Veterinarian, Marine Biologist, Underwater Filmmaker, etc. It was well-organized and rich in information. One innovation that I decided I particularly liked was that they put the Glossary in the front instead of the usual position in the back of the book: though students may not take the time to read it first, they will at least have seen it, so they know they can refer back as needed.

As is so often the case when trying to create a non-fiction early readers, the constraints of the format limit the information severely. With only 1-3 sentences per page, it’s important in such a book to be very careful about choosing what information to include and how to organize it coherently. This one came off as very disjointed.

I love a good wordless picture book, and the illustrations in this one are simply gorgeous! The soft, moody watercolors show us a father-son fishing expedition on the high seas. Below we see a pod of whales swimming by until one gets tangled in some discarded nets and crab pots. As their day comes to an end, the young boy notices the whale’s distress and convinces his dad they must help. As they get close, we see the whale reflected in the eye of the fisherman, and the fisherman and his son reflected in the eye of the whale. The fisherman dives in and cuts the whale free of the ropes, and after he returns safely to his boat, the whale breeches in thank you. Then they sale home in the sunset.

The illustrations in this book are absolutely gorgeous. They invite you into the story so that you almost forget that a tame, talking tiger wouldn’t really wander out of the woods at a family campground. At his family’s traditional end-of-summer camping trip, the young narrator is feeling down about growing up. After a week of sleeping with the tiger, boating and fishing and stargazing with the tiger, he is sad when it leaves camp on their last day to return to its cave, just as his family must return to their home. When he gets home, he immediately draws his tiger friend to show to his new teacher. It’s a story that left me a bit puzzled at the end, wondering, “huh…I wonder what the point of all that was supposed to be…” and yet I didn’t really care that I was a bit confused. It managed to evoke such sentiment and emotion that I really enjoyed it, even if I didn’t quite “get it.”

If you have a population of Haitian students in your school, it might help fill a niche. It is bilingual, and the illustrations are bright and vibrant. But I thought the story felt a little forced. It tells of a young girl after a rough day at school who wanders into an urban garden where a woman is painting a mural and suddenly finds herself transplanted to a garden in San Pedro de Macoris, where a soon-to-be-famous musician asks for her help finishing his song. Then the two fly away to Croix-des-Bouquets to meet a famous artist who asks for Sofi’s help finding just the right shade of purple she needs for her sculpture, before finding herself back in the original garden, where she asks if she can contribute to the mural, and impresses her sister with the purple flower she paints. The way names of certain places and people are mentioned without explanation makes it feel like a tourist book you would buy as a souvenir after having visited those places, but as an independent story I thought it fell a little flat.

It’s a look at science through a poet’s eyes. All the equations in the book specifically focus on the science of Spring, and are even further organized according to early, mid, and late Spring. On each page, an equation is offered in large print, accompanied by a paragraph explaining the equation is smaller print, thereby offering an opportunity to let students ponder the equations and offer their own predictions about what it refers to before reading the author’s interpretation. It invites readers into considering the basic facts of our scientific world in a new way (e.g. “maple trees x buckets + boiling = sticky smile”). The artwork is mixed-media collage and supports the text nicely.

I really love the illustrations: they’re soft and sweet and inviting. I also really love the message it is trying to convey: that each creature plays an important part in the ecosystem, right down to a lowly worm. And I know stories sometimes need to set aside reality to get to the point, but I admit to having trouble suspending my disbelief with this one: just because one worm stopped doing his job, I’m sure there were thousands of others still at it, and it seems like the amount of time it would take for the soil to harden and for the ecosystem to die away and then come back when the worm went back to work would be far longer than the lifespan of a worm. Just saying’.

It’s fine. It tells of a used car salesman who is feeling a bit bored with all his customers on vacation. Things pick up when a series of dinosaurs come in and each drives away in his perfect car. It will get picked up by all those kids who love dinosaur books, but it doesn’t seem to have any purpose other than trying to appeal to kids who like dinosaur books.

It’s really cute. The text tells the story of some toddlers on a pirate adventure, but the illustrations translate that adventure into toddler experiences. When they “sail across the seven seas,” we see the boys on a floatie at the community pool, using part of a pool noodle as their telescope; when their rival pirates “readied their cannons and took aim,” we see water balloons flying through the air. In the end, after being sent to the dungeon (i.e. their separate port-a-cribs under the shade umbrella), they reform their ways…at least some of the time.