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.