It’s a fine biography of a man I knew little of, but there’s nothing about it that really makes me want to recommend it particularly.  I don’t think students will be familiar enough with the scientist in question to be likely to pick it up on their own, and there doesn’t seem to be much to capture their attention if they did.  It’s not bad, but there’s probably better options available.  It does have a very sturdy binding.

Regardless of one’s political viewpoints, there’s no denying that Barack Obama did indeed make history when he became America’s first black president.  The wide variety of individuals covered in this “History Maker Bios” series come from all aspects of society.  The information is clearly written in a very readable voice, and well-illustrated with photos.  Given the opportunity, I would like to have more biographies from this series.

A beautiful story about the power of story.  The story is prefaced with a folktale told to the main character by is mother, and the body of the story tells of a young boy’s imagination being captures by this familiar folktale.  On an outing with his father, when young Jiro is left to explore a neighbor’s garden, he wanders into a tea house where he falls asleep and dreams he’s met the Crane woman from the folktale.  The way the story is told, the line between reality and dream is a blurry one.  The illustrations to an amazing job of capturing both the setting and the mood of the story.

Designed a bit like a guessing game, this fun look at the history of medicine is organized by ailment.  For each malady, it presents several remedies used throughout history, asking the reader to guess which if any had any actual benefit to the patients.  In the subsequent pages it addresses each remedy in turn, describing in more detail how and when and where it was applied, and sometimes why, answering the question as to its efficacy.  It’s a fun way to look at how far we’ve come, and to make the prospect of a trip to a modern doctor much more palatable, even if we are likely to face getting a shot. I think kids will be intrigued.

A simple science reader for young students, this bilingual text explains the traits that define the distinction between living and non-living things.  Examples familiar to young students are given, and the text is accompanied by color photos to help illustrate key points.  It seems to be a smaller version of the Pebble Plus series: similar format, but smaller size.  I find something is lost in the smaller books — if the same titles were available in both, I would recommend the larger format over the smaller.

Bright, comical illustrations and simple, direct text join to tell the story of how big black Crow makes friends with smaller, brighter birds hanging out on the electrical wire.  At first the little birds are scared of Crow and will have nothing to do with him.  Determined to make friends, Crow tries to paint himself to look like the others, only to frighten them more.  In the end, the little birds decide they like having Crow around, crediting him with scaring off the big colorful birds he was pretending to be.  In the end they like him for himself, and Crow must decide whether or not to tell his new friends how their friendship really came about.  It’s a charming book.

This is a story of adjusting to change.  Set in the days of horse-drawn buggies and homesteaders moving west, it tells of Elsie, a happy young girl growing up in Boston.  After her mother’s death, her father decides to seek change by moving Elsie and himself to a sod-roofed home on the prairies of Nebraska.  Elsie has a hard time adjusting to the change, and her only comfort comes from singing to and with her pet canary.  She keeps herself confined to the cabin, afraid to explore her strange new surroundings, until one day when her canary escapes — in rushing after the lost bird, Elsie comes to discover many delights in her new home, making it feel like her home at last.  It’s a sweet, gentle story.

I know Dean Koontz is a famous novelist, and apparently (according to the flyleaf) there have been several other Trixie books before this one, but I’m afraid I wasn’t as impressed as I wanted to be.  The theme is one that kids can relate to: how long a week seems when your best friend is gone.  The pictures are cute.  The ungrammatical parts are probably done on purpose for some reason, but they didn’t really seem to add to my experience of the characters or the story, and I tend to think if you’re putting improper grammar in front of kids there ought to be a good reason for it.  There probably was, but I couldn’t discern it.  It’s trying to read like a poem, but I didn’t find the flow to read all that smoothly.  Over all, it was fine, but not I wasn’t wowed by it.

The purpose of this book is to be a counting-by-fives book, and as such it does a nice job.  It’s got cute pictures of ladybugs, each with five spots on it’s shell, and a new ladybug joins each page, as a domino-style counter in the corner helps the reader count by fives.  The target numeral is hidden in the picture on each page (kids love hunting for hidden elements in the pictures).  It uses rhythm in the repetition of the counting on each page.  In addition, it has another features which could be used as teaching tools, such as alliteration and a repeating adjective-noun-verb-object sentence pattern which could be used in language lessons.  Unfortunately, the bilingual aspect of the book seems to have been a bit of an after-thought and is somewhat clunky at times:  the alliteration is lost and the sentence structure/rhythm don’t work as well.

Another good choice in the Pebble Plus series.  Like the other books in this series, this title features full-page color photos to support the text, a high-interest non-fiction topic for students, text which is accessible to early readers (large font, with just a few simple sentences per page), and solid information.  This particular title begins by describing some typical features of hip-hop dance and goes on to instruct students in some simple moves.  I particularly like that the photos that accompany the text feature other children.