Jill McDougall

This book is great for beginning readers of science. I feel like young children are interested in gross, weird things, so this book about snails and slugs is great! My student in class read this book with me and she told me she counts all the slugs she sees after it rains. She also made connections like how the snails shell looked like a shell on a necklace she has. I think this book does a great job comparing and contrasting two things (snails and slugs). This would be great for a compare and contrast activity!… (mehr)

http://shawjonathan.wordpress.com/2012/05/09/anna-the-goanna/

This is a collection of poems written by a schoolteacher ‘in order to provide classroom reading material which reflected the daily experiences of her students’. That description, taken from Jill McDougall’s bio at the back of this book, could be a recipe for a boring disaster, all the more so when the students in question are Aboriginal. On the contrary, this collection is a delight, words and images both. I’d be surprised if this book didn’t go down very well indeed in the classroom and out of it, performed for the students or by them or read in private, by curious non-Indigenous as well as Indigenous children.

As the title promises, there are silly poems about goannas. There are also mosquitoes, crows, flies, and a crocodile, but it’s not all animals. There are babies, big sisters, football and baseball, a sweet comedy about the difference between Aboriginal and mainstream economics, and two pieces that depart from the general cheerful tone – ‘Too Many Drunks’ and ‘Sad Boys’, the latter being about petrol sniffing.

Jenny Taylor’s warm, respectiful illustrations demonstrate just how crucial the interplay of text and image can be to the success a picture book.… (mehr)