Wil MaraRezensionen

ages 5-8

Trucks

IRL: ‎2 - 4
Awards: N/A

Gory and awesome. Loved it.

Independent Reading Level: Grades 2-5
Awards and Honors: n/a

Preachy little picture book about otters, with not much more information than a 10min film would give and with less cute.

This book helps students imagine themselves in the main characters shoes and really get the feel of the situation. It shows two main characters from different backgrounds and it is a story of how they come together despite the differences and save themselves in tough times. I think this would be awesome as a supporting tool when introducing how the 13 colonies was and how our country started.

This is a cute book with great imagery. The book makes the reader think about the American revolution and how it would have been if you were a kid then. This book would be great for a History or English class, for the reader to be able to put themselves in the point of view of someone during that time or someone in the book.

I thought this might be a great read for helping add to the fun of learning history, but I can say the book was actually a let down for me. I wish the book would have had a narrative around facts about the lives during the war instead of small comments in and around the pictures. The story and pictures were nice, but I was hoping to be able to use it more for teaching.

I have to agree with the other review of this book. I had higher hopes for it. The ending artifacts like the glossary and timeline were awesome but it lacked a hook. It is about two kids who go to warn their father that the Patriots are coming but when they arrive it is to late. I wish this book was based off of more facts and it used more interesting details of the American Revolution than it did. I would use this as more of a "fun" read to introduce this section of social studies but not so much for a factual part of a lesson.

This story is a biography of Alexander Graham Bell. It is written in simple words for kids to understand. It includes a lot of important dates and has a lot of helpful definitions embedded throughout the book. It gives background on Graham Bell's life, such as where he was born, what his father and grandfather did, and how he invented the telephone. I like this book because it is short and sweet, but gives all the key details of Alexander Graham Bell's life. It also has pictures on every page, which is helpful for keeping students engaged. I think this would be a great book for students to read on their own because it is written in kid-friendly language and it has pictures to help readers understand what is being discussed.

00014539

A good read for middle school children. There is a little bit of challenging structure and vocabulary but there is a lot of good information. This book would be good for resources to use during projects. The illustrations in this book help to emphasize what was occurring during the civil rights movement and how important of a moment that it was in history.

599.88

This biography is an introduction to the life of George Washington, who became the first president of the United States after leading the American military in the Revolutionary War against England.

This biography introduces Henry Ford, the inventor of the first modern car and assembly line, and who made cars affordable for everyone.

This book is definitely an easy read and students of very young ages would be abel to follow along. The book tells the story of Abraham Lincoln and includes illustrations of actual historical pictures. It shows him as a child, to working as a shop keeper, to becoming a lawyer, and to becoming president. The book gives dates and helpful background knowledge for students incase they do not understand a word in the book. It even goes so far to put the pronunciation of some words. Overall a great book for younger grades, as a sort of introduction of biographies.

Abraham Lincoln "Honest Abe" was the sixteenth president of the United States and was the reason slavery became illegal. In 1863 he signed the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing all the people enslaved. Some people, especially people from the South, were angry with Lincoln because of this. In 1865, he was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth in a theatre. Lincoln did what he believed what was right and helped the United States on its way to becoming a free country.

This book was very informative but lacked a reading "hook." The book introduces the time and setting and then jumps into the past. The characters of Samuel and Molly are introduced and the "plot" revolves around them. When Samuel spots British troops marching down the road, he knows he has to go warn his dad and Uncle Daniel who were Patriots and were going to be in trouble. Cousin Molly had the same idea and they ran to tell their fathers. However, they were too late, the British soldiers were reprimanding the men. Molly shouted and distracted the British as their fathers escaped and they went off into the night to a friend's house for safety. This book had little squares of information on each page with photographs of items from the time and facts about life during the American Revolution. The "story" of this book was lackluster and I wish it would have just been factual and had more blurbs about real artifacts since the story contributed little. The glossary, map, and timeline at the end was great.½

Henry Ford is famous for his innovative invention of the automobile, and this story goes through Ford's entire process of becoming the successful man he turned out to be.
What I noticed about these scholastic biography books is that they are small chapter books, and there is also a glossary in the back of the story. In this particular biography, the glossary words are "innovator" and "plant". I can see these books being used in a classroom (both reading and social studies) to not only examine these important people in history, but to also get comfortable reading chapter books, as well as enhance their vocabulary.½

Jackie Robinson made history by becoming the first African-American to play on an all-white baseball team. Reading this reminded me of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Rosa Parks, and more. All of those people were "firsts" of something, and that itself is inspiring.
I love how this biography does not only touch upon Robinson's life and career, but it also touches upon segregation. I could see this book being taught during Black History Month, or truly any time of the year.

I felt that "Anne Frank" did a great job at outlining the life of Anne Frank. It was very factual and had real photographs which I enjoyed. It even included pictures of what the house looks like today. There were little bubbles on some of the pages with "fast facts" and the book was very informative. It covered the Nazi's movement around Germany and the Netherlands and it also showed a zoomed in geographic map of where we are in the world. It had a hopeful tone even though her life was very tragic and it described events in a way that a 1st grader might understand without scaring them too much.

Easy to read book about fire fighters, fire drills and making plans for a family safety guide. Pierce County Library. ages 4-6

This installment of the Big Business series of books by ABDO publishing outlines major points of the international oil industry from history to modern and future production. Chapter titles give clear indication for where information may be found. For the parts of the book that deal with the history of the oil industry, Wil Mara obviously organizes the chapters in chronological order with sensible transitions to different periods, and the other chapter titles are clear enough that one can tell generally what it is about. “How It All Works Today” would indicate to me that the chapter would be concerning the drilling, refining, transportation, and uses of oil in modern times and it is. I would say that I would not have started with a chapter on oil technology innovation then proceed into a lengthy section of the book dealing with history, to come back to modern methods and politics. I might have broken the book into two parts: history and from today forward.
The front cover makes it very clear what the general aesthetic of the book will be. Large photographs and attractive graphic designs permeate the text to catch and hold the attention of students of all ages. Moving into the book, the endpages are blank, which could have been easily modified with any relevant photograph(s), even if the entire page weren’t taken up. I noticed on the copyright page, there is a notice that says the book is printed on recycled paper. I appreciate that and find it especially fitting for this book in particular.
The author uses a neutral tone throughout the book, being careful to try to include multiple sides for arguments about alternative energy. The last paragraph of the book for example, “Companies are also searching for new sources of petroleum. These efforts have continued to stir up controversy among those who believe the conversion to alternative energy sources should start now. However, transitioning the world’s economy and infrastructure away from oil will not be an easy process. For more than a century, the world has run on oil. And for the foreseeable future, it will remain a critical component of the planet’s energy supply.” (p.94) For the age group, this is absolutely crucial so that they may form their own opinions and not just be told that one way is right. Children will often believe the first opinion they are told is right on a political issue and not even fully consider alternatives until forced. I also very much appreciate the precise language used by Mara because even if a younger student is not understanding every word they read, they are at least getting exposure to the correct and more sophisticated vocabulary.
This series of books also improves clarity with clear transitions between chapters, changing the background of the page to a deep blue and having a relevant full page photograph on the left-hand page. Frequent sidebars also give further information when a topic had to be glossed over slightly in the main text. At the end of the text, there is a nice map showing national oil production percentages as of 2016, followed by a timeline, glossary, and index, as well as very detailed source information.
Overall, I think this book does what it was designed to do very well, it gives students a shallow, but very broad overview of the global oil production scene, and just how impactful this chemical anomaly has become in modern society. This is a vital thing to know about for many fields, especially politics or geology. There was one issue, however that I noticed that seemed pretty glaring. The chapters on history of course cover all major wars, as oil was a very large contributing factor to political pressures, and of course military prowess, “Oil, the blood of the Earth, was the blood of victory…Germany had boasted too much of its superiority in iron and coal, but it had not taken sufficient account of our superiority in oil… As oil had been the blood of war, so it would be the blood of the peace.” (p.42) As soon as it gets to the 80’s however, it just zooms through the chapter, spending one paragraph on the two and a half decades between 1990 and when the book was written somewhere between 2015 and 2016. The closest mentioning of our conflict in the middle east is one sentence, “A spike in oil prices occurred in 1990, driven by market panic in the wake of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait.” (p.66) While the war was not chiefly about oil, it definitely still seemed relevant enough to warrant some discussion, especially seeing as some of the readers in the intended audience at the publication date of 2017 were alive for the attack on 9/11.½

This is a decent book for beginning readers and teaching about writing biographies, however I think it is lacking in content. It promotes misconceptions as well. For example, it states that the Emancipation Proclamation freed all the slaves, in reality it only freed the slaves in the Confederacy. It merely states that the civil war happened between the North and South, but gave no reasons. A book can be accessible for young readers without being dumbed down to the extent this book is.