Title: Trick or Treat, Smell My Feet

Author: Diane de Groat

Age level: K-3rd Grade

Rating: 4



Summary: This book is about a brother and sister getting their costumes ready for Halloween trick or treating, as well as the mix up that ends up making Gilbert wear a ballerina outfit!?

Opinion: I think that this book was entertaining. I wrote that the age level would be around K-3rd grade because it is a good book to be able to read to younger kids, and I feel like around second or third grade the students should be ok to read this book by themselves. The story is written as one that can easily keep the students attention, especially with the pictures that are drawn. I also think it's cool that the illustrator in this particular book chose to use water colors to make the pictures. The colors that the watercolors bring out make the pictures very attention grabbing.

Connection: This book would obviously be a good book to use during the Halloween time. It centers on an activity that students can relate to, in having a Halloween party at school and going trick or treating with a sibling. It also has hidden points that would be good to point out to the younger students. One of which I picked up on was that "You are you, and I am me," they use something like this a couple times in the book where the older brother says to his sister "I would do that if I were you, but I'm me." This is a good message to students that they don't have to follow what others are doing, and they can be themselves.

Title: Amazing Snakes!

Author: Sarah L. Thomson

Age level: 1-3 grades

Rating: 3



Summary: This book is written with a ton of facts about snakes. It talks about anything you want to know about snakes in general.

Opinion: I think that this book is obviously very informative. It would be a great resource for students who have to do a research project or a presentation about snakes. However, I don't think that it is as captivating as it could be. Snakes are very interesting and fun to learn about, but I feel like the way they are presented in pretty dry. One big positive for me when reading this book was the pictures that they show in the book. When they talk about a certain type of snake they do a good job of showing a real picture of that snake. This is a cool feature because many students may not have known what a rattle snake looked like before reading this book.

Connection: As I mention before, this book could be very useful in a research activity. It's a pretty easy read for students to go through and pick up some facts about snakes. Another really good feature that this book provides that is extremely unique is that they put in parenthesis how to pronounce words that kids may have problems with. An example was "prey," they would put underneath it (say it like this: Pray.) This makes a book that is already kid friendly even easier for students who may have problems sounding tricky words out by themselves. It would be cool to have the whole class read this book and have a group discussion about interesting facts that they learned. You could write out all the different facts that the students learned on the chalk board or big sheet of paper to show all the different facts learned.

Title: There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed Some Leaves

Author: Lucille Colandro

Age Group: Grades K-2

Rating: 5



Summary: This book is much like the old lady who swallowed the fly, it starts with the old lady who swallowed something, and each time she swallows something they go back and repeat everything she has swallowed.

Opinion: I really enjoy the way that children's books in general are written, and this is another one that does a good job with everything. This is another book that I feel the pictures lend so much to the overall presentation of the book that I really think the author could take all the words out of this book and even a child could follow along with what is happening. The Illustrator did such a good job with having the pictures paint a story of their own that half the fun in this book is seeing what is going on in the pictures. I also noticed early on that it is fun to guess what she is eating the certain things for. I immediately thought after the first few that she was making a scarecrow in her stomach, but I was in for a surprise at the end when she sneezed and everything she swallowed came out!

Connection: Along with the trick or treat book, this is a great book to read to the class during the fall. This would be a good book to read with the other "old lady who swallowed a ____" books. It would be fun to let the kids hear the different kind of stories of the old lady swallowing objects and compare what she is swallowing in the different books. I think that the children would be easily entertained by this book, when I read it to students at Solon Elementary they loved being able to guess what the old lady was going to swallow next!