Kathleen T. IsaacsCritiques

Very good resource

Excellent Books for Early and Eager Readers by Kathleen T. Isaacs is more or less a giant bibliography of books for children. It's organized into different categories such as transitional books (between picture books, easy readers, or short chapter books), quests, talking animal stories, and books about magic. I ended up taking down so many titles to add to my TRL that I had a stack that was nigh on teetering to the ceiling (18 books before I stopped counting). Needless to say, this is an excellent resource for anyone who is either a professional working with children or a parent trying to encourage their child to reach their maximum potential. (It doesn't beat the Read-Aloud Handbook though.) This isn't a book one would generally read cover-to-cover (although that's exactly what I did) but rather one you'd dip in and out of for ideas on books you and the children in your life could read. 8/10

Summary; This book has every kind of information that pops into our minds on a daily basis. It gives facts on subjects such as health, our bodies, family, school, history, important people, and our environment. This book is create for kids whose mind tend to get curious quite often.
Personal Reaction; I think this book is great for introducing common core standard subjects and information and spark the interest for learning those subjects by even giving them a head start. Great for kids who ask a lot of, "how, when, why, what," questions.
Classroom Extension Ideas;
1. Have students illustrate how the viewed the world before reading this book and after.
2. Have students list what they learned from the book that they never knew about in the world they live.
3. Use to introduce social studies, biology, and history to the students.

Picturing the World: Informational Picture Books for Children is an informational book about all different kinds of topics for kids. Since the common core is pushing for informational books, authors have taken information and put into a fun and engaging picture book that can help children to understand and want to read it. This book includes information about families, school, health, our bodies, nature, influential figures and world history.

This is a fun list that every parent wishes they had for their early precocious reader who di driving their teacher crazy because they are reading before we expect them to do so. After a couple of explanatory chapters about this type of reader and how the books were selected, Isaacs gives us an annotated bibliography by topics. These include themes such as: talking animals and little people, traditional tales, real places and people, humor, and more complicated plots among others. This list needs to be circulated to the teachers of preschoolers and Kindergarten. And, it is an example of a list that needs to be in a database for easy direct ordering by teacher librarians. The printed bibliography continues to be published… but needs to be a database that is constantly updated by authors. One wonders if this will ever happen in the library world. Recommended for programs searing our wonderful youngsters.

Summary: This book has many different stories with subjects like families, school, health, our bodies, nature, influential figures and world history. This book is filled with so much information, and children will learn so much about so many different subjects.

Personal connection: I would love to use this book in my classroom, and feel like it could be used to teach students a wealth of information.

Class use: This would be better in a Social Studies classroom to teach all aspects from all over the world.

Because of the Common Core standards, the emphasis is now on quality informational books in any format that will attract young readers as they explore the world of ideas and places. Isaacs has assembled an excellent collection of pictures books grouped by broad subjects and annotated to give a good idea about the contents. Her first chapter give an excellent criteria list for evaluating such resources and the titles are geared to the youngest up until about age ten. We noticed that most of the titles listed are from 2006-2009 with a few in 2010. Such is the nature of slow editorial and publishing deadlines and is more and more problematic for reference books of all kinds that should be digital and uptdated by authors on a regular basis. So, some titles are likely to be out of print but can be accessed and updated in systems such as Title Wave. So, if you like a bibliography in print form that you can pick up at your leisure to explore collection possibilities, here is a quality list to check againt your current collection. More and more such titles are available in digital form and are interactive to such an extent that the idea of a printed picture book is now under a transition. None of these formats are listed here and will have to be discovered elsewhere. We predict that such lists as these in printed form will soon vanish as teacher librarians do more and more of their selection on line.