A good description of many animals’ behaviors that resemble those of humans.  Drawing the similarities with familiar human behaviors gives young readers a connection to relate to the different animals, but the book goes on to explain why those animals behave as they do, which may vary from human motivations:  humans may dance simply for the fun of it, but for honey bees this is a means of communication.

This strikes me as a book that started with a title, as the publisher decided they wanted to write a series about the technologies of the different wars, and then they sat down to write this one and realized they didn’t have a whole lot that was specific to the topic to write.  It gives a good overview of the war in general, and it does point out that this was the first time helicopters were used as ambulances, but most of the technology used during the korean war  had also been used in WWII.  It does have a good binding and photos from the time as illustration.  It’s also guilty of including one of those inferior timelines on which the spacing of the line has absolutely no relation to the passing of time.

It’s a story about taking things too far, about sticking to your guns, and about a community rallying together to stand up to a tyrant.  The village of La Paz started out as a place where everyone sang all the time, but when the noise became too much to take, they hired a mayor who instituted such rules as to make the village completely silent.  The mayor finally met his match in a rooster who found such joy he could not help but sing.  One by one the mayor took away all the things that were giving the rooster joy, but there was always something more worth singing about.  When the mayor finally threatened to turn the rooster into soup, the rooster insisted that a song would never die as long as there was someone to sing it, at which point the entire village joined together to take up the rooster’s song and drive away the bullying mayor.

If your students are fans of the rest of this series, they’ll enjoy this one, too.  It’s got the same rhythm and rhyme, and the same colorful, friendly-looking dinosaurs engaging in everyday human activities, in this case deciding how to choose a pet.  It offers up all sorts of silly options involving smuggling non-pet-like animals out of the zoo before suggesting that a dinosaur would never do such a thing, but instead would choose a harmless critter from a farm or shelter or pet store to love.  A good mix of fanciful imagination and everyday kid issues.

Different formatting could have made a big difference for this book.  The illustrations are cool.  Animal camouflage is always a topic of interest.  Poetry doesn’t seem like the most natural genre for the topic. There are information pages in the back of the book with informational paragraphs about each of the animals in the book, but too many students ignore the back-of-book information.  This book would have been stronger if the information had been included in side-bar blurbs right alongside the poems in the main body of the book.

The binding is great.  The full-page color photos are fabulous.  But the information is a bit shallow and rather strangely organized.  Each page offers two to three sentences about a different animal that happens to be green.  There’s no real consistency about the type of information offered on each animal.  It doesn’t specifically focus on how their greenness is significant, though a sentence in the back of the book does state that mostly green is used for camouflage.

The illustrations are really cute, but the story falls a bit flat.  As a bunch of kids set off to trick-or-treat, one of the little girls is startled to notice the moon is disappearing (behind some clouds).  Her big brother (?) declares that he, as Sorcerer of Space, is the only one who can save the moon.  Gretchen tags along as his sidekick and together they climb a ladder to the moon and discover that it is being eaten by jack-o-lanterns, from which they save it before returning to trick-or-treating. Not much of anything in the way of character development.

It begins with a porcupine having a picnic, eating some clover.  Then a series of random animals ask to join him, to which he is agreeable, but none of them ever want to share his clover. Instead they say what they will eat instead.  The final animal invited to join the picnic is a tiger, and when asked what he will eat, he declares, “all of you!” and that’s when the story ends.  The pictures are cute (big eyes on giraffe), but the ending is a bit startling, and may freak out some kids.  A final information page at the end does explain that this story couldn’t really happen because the animals come from all different places, but nobody ever reads that part.  There’s a lot of repetition in the text, but not really consistently enough to make it predictable for emergent readers.

A reasonable choice if you are looking for early readers about ocean animals.  The binding is sturdy.  The text is simple and direct. It’s got full-color photos and all the usual non-fiction text features.  It’s nature as an early reader puts some limits on the depth of information included, but it’s not completely wimpy in this regard.  One flaw I think young students would find confusing is on the pages where it is trying to show the lengths of the smallest and longest seahorses in comparison to other everyday objects:  the illustrations and the information don’t coincide — the smallest seahorse is described as .5 inches, in comparison to a penny, labeled as .75 inches, and yet the picture of the seahorse is bigger than the picture of the penny; the pictures of the smallest and largest seahorses (labeled as .5 inches and 12 inches, respectively, compared to a penny and a basketball respectively), are identical in size. Little kids will be confused by this.

Set in Boston in 1959, this story is told from the perspective of a young African American boy who is waiting to see his favorite baseball team, the Red Sox become integrated, and the joy he and his family felt when Pumpsie Green took to the field.  An author’s note in the back points out that it took 12 years after Jackie Robinson for all the professional baseball teams to open their ranks to blacks.  It shares a bit about the racism he and his family experienced at the ball park, too.  It certainly has a place, sharing a bit of history that tends to be overlooked.  I would have liked it better if it shared more about Pumpsie himself.