The Foot Book

 

Category: Juvenile Fiction
Age: For Beginning readers

Author: Theodor Seuss Geisel. Illustrated by Dr. Seuss

 

(Review by Marcelo Mediavilla)

 

 

Children will love this foot-filled and classic book written by Theodore Seuss Geisel, who was commonly known as Dr. Seuss. The book combines brief and illustrated stories, easy words and good rhythm which make it ideal to work with children who are starting to read. The Foot Book will have them eager to dive into the magic world created by Dr. Seuss and it also has the didactic potential for teachers to deal with nouns and adjectives through the whole book.

 

When the author died in 1991, at the age of 87, he had already published more than 44 books written and illustrated by him. Using this combination of funny stories, pictures that looks like cartoons and good rhymes, Dr. Seuss entertains the readers of The Foot Book. This particular style proved to be successful and you can find it through most of his work.

 

The Foot Book is great to share with young learners. Its rhymes are quick and unique, and its illustrations will fascinate the readers. The book will surely help teachers in their daily class activities and keep in mind that it helped millions of kids not only to read but to enjoy the reading too.

Despite and In spite of:

• They are prepositional expressions. They express a contrast between two things. They are both more common in writing than in speaking. Despite is a little more formal than in spite of.

• We usually use in spite of and despite with a noun:

     He got the job in spite of his prison record.

     John’s company is doing extremely well         despite the recession.

• We can also use in spite of and despite with -ing:

     He was very fast in spite of being terribly        overweight.

     They arrived late despite leaving in plenty      of time.

• We don’t use a that-clause after in spite of or despite. We use in spite of the fact that or despite the fact that:

    When they arrived at Malaga it was hot, in     spite of the fact that it was only the end of       April.

Review: “When the elephant walks”
Keiko Kasza
A booklet of children´s literature
(Reviewed by Rocio S. Gonzalez)

In 1990, Paperstar first published “When the elephant walks”, a didactic book written and illustrated by Keiko Kasza. By reading this book students from 4th/5th grade will find a humorous story in which the writer describes a chain of reactions of different animals scaring each other.
In this story, the walking elephant scares a bear, who runs away and scares a crocodile. This reptile swims for his life and scares a wild Hog, and so on, when finally, a little mouse is scared. In order to make the reading easier, the author and illustrator of this book uses not only big and charming illustrations, but also simple sentences, which correspond to the pictures. What is more , Kasza uses repetition of structure in her sentences, eliciting from students what is coming next in the story.
The book has the didactic potential to introduce different animals and the actions they perform, such as run, swim, jump, etc. Values are also another topic dealt in the story. At the end of the book the author adds an after-reading section called “A note from Keiko Kasza”. Here, she encourages children to reflect on feeling scared and the sensations experimented every time they are afraid of something. She also cheers them not to feel afraid by reflecting on the moral of the story, “even someone bigger than you could get scared too”.
  I recommend this book because of the topics which are developed. This kind of predictable stories are a great tool for students to get engaged on debates about the topic.