This fun dinosaur book is written in a bit of a story style.  It is full of questions to make the reader think.  The pictures are inviting and interesting.  At the end of the book are a variety of fun activities, a puppet making project, a quiz about the information in the book, and a couple of poems.

I enjoyed the light humor and interesting facts.  It’s a wonderful book for young readers and listeners with a large variety of things.  A good addition to our library.

This book surprised me.  It looked like and started like a story book about a tiger family. The book ended up being a book about ecology.  It has a wide variety of information about our earth and how it has and is changing throughout it’s history.

It encourages us to be good to the earth and take care of what we have. throughout the book are learning circles filled with interesting facts that clarify or enhance the information on the pages.

The pictures are fun, colorful and interesting.  This is a good science book for children.

“There are 418 different kinds of parrots and related species.”  This small  7″ X 6″ page book shows only a few of them, but these usually highly colorful birds pictured will elicit ‘oohs’ and ‘ahhs’.  Brief, simple, general information is given about parrot claws, coloring, size, hooked beaks, good memory and habitat are given.

Includes 6 transparent pages among the highly glossy pages with metal comb binding.

The reader follows a chestnut tree through the changes of four seasons. Three of the six transparent pages reveal the inside and outside of a chestnut husk, above and below the ground of the tree, and before and after the tree bud opens. Then examples of five distinct deciduous tree shapes are illustrated, followed by five distinct deciduous tree leaf shapes and their corresponding seeds. Finally, five evergreen tree examples are pictured with five different evergreen tree cones.

This book has heavy board pages with sturdy metal comb binding.

“What is geography for? To get to know what the surface of the Earth looks like.” So begins this First Discovery book for second through fourth graders. Illustrators Ute Fuhr and Raoul Sautai have created mountain, coastline, valley, plain, delta, river valley, the Grand Canyon, and volcanic island landscapes with distinct geographic features labeled. The text across the top of the page is over simplified without supporting details. The readers will enjoy the four transparent pages flipping them back and forth to see the before and after erosion scenes.

This book is made of heavy board pages with sturdy metal comb binding.

In book 3 of the Infinity Ring series, Sera, Riq, and Dak travel to the year 1850 in the state of Maryland.  Their mission is to fix a break in the time continuum that has something to do with the Underground Railroad and Harriett Tubman.  With Riq being of African descent, he is immediately captured and fixed to be sold at a slave auction with a black woman and her two children.  While waiting for the auction, Riq discovers that the woman is an ancestor of his and he must help her to fulfill her destiny if he is to even exist in the future.  The three time travelers work to ensure the right people get to Canada to freedom and that the Underground Railroad is successful.  McMann does a great job of keeping the action moving as well as characterization.  This is a great way for young readers to get to know more about American history.  Each book takes the three friends to different eras throughout history.

Pluto Visits Earth! is classified as an Everybody Reads/Picture book, however it is chock full of science factoids.  The story goes that Pluto has heard that he’s been downgraded from a planet to a dwarf planet.  He goes to the other planets to find out why and at each one the reader gets a nugget of knowledge.  Eventually Pluto goes to Earth and finds out eventually that he doesn’t meet all the requirements to be a planet, which is to be able to “use it’s gravity to clear it’s orbit of any asteriods.”  Students will recognize the familiar artwork of Jared Lee because of the Black Lagoon series.  What a gentle, interesting way to learn about the solar system.

Letting Go is the story about three hens who believe that a fox is up in an apple tree throwing the apples at them.  They get hysterical because they are afraid the fox will come after them next.  They run to get the rooster, but when he is almost hit by an apple, he runs away.  The hens muster up the courage to get a ladder and go up the tree to see about the fox.  When one hen finally reaches the top, she realizes that the apples just ‘let go’ and fall.  She realizes the view from the top of the tree is beautiful and the other hens come up to see for themselves.  The moral to the story is that sometimes you just have to ‘let go’, let go of fear and anything else that paralyzes you.  The story is simple yet eloquent.  The illustrations and dialogue are reminescent of Mo Willems.  This is the perfect pairing with Chicken Little.

Mom’s are wonderful!  They kiss our boo-boos, they play with us, read to us, and generally make all the icky things in the world better.  For Little Princess, her mom made everything right.  Then one day, Little Princess was invited to a sleepover, and although she was scared at first, it was alright.  But it was mom who suffered because it was the first time her baby had been away from home at night without her.  This is a perfect story for the younger kiddos, especially for Mother’s Day.  Everyone (hopefully) can identify with that one special person who makes our life so enjoyable.  Clear illustrations that show perfectly the neediness of Little Princess and the anxiety she causes others.

Randy needed glasses to see better, but he does not want to wear them.  He finds ways to lose the or get them broken, but each time his mother has another pair for him to put on.  She bought four extra pairs!  When he thought he has done away with all four of them his doctor came over and brought him five more specs just in case.

Randy wasn’t happy until his father came in with new glasses and told him,”Now I will look a bit more like you.”

Then Randy was happy to be able to see.

I didn’t like the way Randy was able to lose or break is glasses without consequences.  That can be very expensive for a parent.

I loved the pictures.