Children's books!

Children must be read to and read in order to have successful lives growing up. Reading is essential to a child’s development. As Temple, Martinez, and Yokota (2019) state, “Children need to develop reading fluency or ‘automaticity’ and soak up the vocabulary, sentence patterns, and longer structures that are unique to books” (p.5). Reading is a part of life and interaction with people from different cultures. A good book is a book that helps children understand themselves and appreciate others from different cultures – it is critical that students learn more about themselves as well as learn about others who are different from themselves (Temple, Martinez, and Yokota, 2019). Children need the exposure to other cultures so that they are empathetic towards one another.

In “The Three Billy Goats Gruff” by Ellin Rudin, the story flows in a simple manner that children can follow. The three goats want to get to the other side of a bridge to eat the nice green grass, but there is a troll that has prevented them from crossing over. One by one, the goats cross – the first two, smaller, goats cross and tell the troll that there is a bigger goat coming. When the biggest goat, Big Billy Goat Gruff, is crossing, the troll challenges the goat, but the goat hits the troll off the bridge. After this, the three goats travel freely across the bridge. This novel provides children an experience of something “magical” - strange and wonderful – that could be a piece of reality or tied into something truer than what is known (Temple et al., 2019). Fantasy provides children with an outlet to explore ideas outside of what they know. Rudin gives her audience a tale about overcoming obstacles using characters that can relate to real life.

In “Little Bo-Peep” by Helen Wing, the story shows how three sheep leave to go participate in a beauty pageant that they end up winning. The way this book is read can be seen through rhymes (Temple et al., 2019). Wing made the story interesting through the ways she implemented the rhythm of the text. This picture book helps children understand what the sheep are doing using the illustrations. This book is a picture storybook because the illustrations and text go hand in hand to amplify each other (Temple et al., 2019). The picture and the words give you the importance of the beauty pageant that the sheep win.

In “My Book of Words” by Rebecca Heller, the book provides different words by categories. Heller gives the children a chance to look at how words are related to one another without saying they’re related. This is a concept book because it conveys knowledge of certain topics by answering “What’s that?” without asking that question – they are in categories without stating the category (Temple et al., 2019). When children are reading this book, they will make connections about items that are like each other.

In “The Little Fish that Got Away” by Bernadine Cook, the book talks about how the boy was fishing and was being patient while fishing. The boy finally caught three fish and one of the fishes, the small one, got away. This is a predictable book because the story keeps on reading with the same words over and over (Temple et al., 2019). There is a constant pattern with the text, the story talks about how a fish swims up, but then swims away and the boy does not catch the fish. Eventually he catches a fish, and one fish gets away.