Wade Cooper (1)

First and second graders, the intended audience for this Level Two Scholastic Early Reader, will find their developing reader skills supported by a limited vocabulary. Longer sentences help to strengthen reading skills at this stage and encourage young readers to explore a variety of topics.

“Starry, Starry Night” takes the reader into space. Beginning with the Milky Way, children explore the sun, the solar system, rocky planets, and gas planets. Then it’s off to the moon, the space station, Mars, and deep space. A brief quiz helps to evaluate content comprehension; a dictionary of relevant terms and a listing of key words are also included.

A page of reading support suggestions for parents allows active involvement in helping the child strengthen reading skills.

Highly recommended.… (mehr)

A brief summary:
In a poetic style, this book introduces the reader to a variety of night creatures, including owls, foxes, badgers, and bats. Each page has a riddle-like description of the animal along with "Did you know?" fact and a photo of the animal. The end of the book contains a quiz that has questions on the various night creatures such as, "What do owls eat?" and "What do moths use their antenna for?" The book also contains a dictionary and a page of key words that are used throughout the book.

My personal reaction:
I think this book is a good early reader as it uses simple rhyming patterns and pictures to help the reader learn new information and vocabulary on nocturnal creatures. I like how each description is like a riddle. The rhyme and structure of each riddle helps students learn new words by being able to identify word sound patterns and by being able to read and repeat individual sentences of the riddle for understanding.

A couple of uses:
- I would use the rhyming riddle structure of this book to teach kids how to make their own riddles about animals. This book is about nocturnal creatures, but I think it would be fun to apply this idea to other types of creatures, such as underwater creatures or dessert creatures. Each student could pick a creature from the specified category and then work on illustrating and writing their own riddle.
- I could use this as a mentor text for showing students how to use the pictures of an informational book to uncover more information about the subject. For example, I could have students look at the pictures and ask themselves questions such as, "What would it feel like to touch?" and "What sound does it make?"

Genre:
informational

Media:
Digital photos… (mehr)

In my opinion this is a good book. I think it is good because the language throughout is clear. It has short, to the point sentences such as, "The sun is one star in the Milky Way. It is a ball of burning gas. It gives us heat and energy on earth." The words are easy to understand as well because it explains many of them throughout. Another reason I like the book is because of the pictures presented on each page. Whenever a page talks about a certain topic there is a picture of it on the page. When it talks about the planets closest to the sun, for example, there are pictures of Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars. A final reason I enjoyed the book is the accuracy of information. The book had a lot of information about Space in a simple way. The book even had "Did you know?" blurbs throughout to give the reader a little more information about the topic on the page. The big idea in this book is to teach about the basic concepts of outer space in a simple way that children can understand.… (mehr)