Library

First Step Nonfiction: Community Buildings

by Sheila Anderson

Give beginning readers a peek inside those community buildings to familiarize themselves with the objects and people commonly found there. Color photos directly correspond to the simple text on each page.

8 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2007

Reviews

[Audrey's Picture Books · Rating 1 out of 5]

I admire what this book wanted to do, but it failed. If you're going to write a book in the format where each page has a different variation of "It has ___," you have to be very mindful of what word you fill the blank with. Children at that reading level are not doing any decoding work yet. They're reading by sight words, patterns, and pictorial cues. So, you need to make sure that your pictures are absolutely clear about what word will fill the blank. This book does fine with that on a couple of pages ("It has books" and "It has movies" are both very clear). However, it also has a page that reads "It has reading spaces." No 5-year-old is going to extrapolate that phraseology from the picture. The first page is equally problematic: "There is a library in my community." This page will be entirely unreadable for the target audience of the book. If you can read that page, then, by definition, you have passed the point at which this book will be helpful to you. It would have been much better to go with something along the lines of "I go to the library" or "I like the library." The last page could then echo the wording of the first, keeping the sight word vocabulary of the book small: "Do you go to/like the library?" As written ("Have you been to a library?"), the book introduces four new sight words.

Children need very simple books to start out reading with, and they need books with the structure this one attempts to provide. But that structure can't be filled in at random. Every word and every picture must be chosen with extreme precision and care. This book takes a haphazard approach, and the result is a book that is not suited to the needs of young readers at any level. It is too difficult for its intended audience, but too repetitive and simple for readers who can handle its sight word vocabulary.

[Amanda · Rating 1 out of 5]

I love libraries but I did not love this book. It is only a couple of pages but despite being so short and seemingly “simple” it is not a decidable book. If you were hoping to use the pictures to support the reading then this is not good for that reason either because a few pictures like “reading spaces” would be really hard to guess from the picture.