It's Beginning to Look Like Winter for My Little Reader
Written: May 09 '08
Product Rating:
Pros: short descriptive text, cute cartoon illustrations that add to it, lots of facts
Cons: not the most engaging topic but still fun to read about
The Bottom Line: It's easy to get your little one enthused about picture books with talking cats and mice, but here's a title to work that nonfiction angle, too.
For some reason, my little girl was asking about winter and snow about a month ago. Spring was here but she was thinking of the colder months. So I checked this book out of the library. I remember reading somewhere that it’s a good nonfiction book for young children. I have to agree.
The basics Snow is a level one Ready-to-Read 32-page book. There are only a couple of sentences per spread and lots of cartoonish illustrations showing a bundled-up little boy and his dog enjoying the weather. They build a snowman, go sledding, trudge through the snow, catch snowflakes on their tongue, and more. But the text does not talk about these characters. Instead, it offers matter-of-fact details about winter weather and snow that somewhat correspond to what the characters are doing. A final page of facts offers more scientific information about snow, such as the fact that every snowflake has six sides and can contain as many as 50 ice crystals.
My thoughts
Although this book is short and appropriate for new readers, it’s packed with lots of information, and not just in the endnote. The sentences and vocabulary are short and fairly easy to read yet paint a picture of winter (ie, “Gray clouds crawl across the sky”). Some of the harder words include: crystals, enough, and beautiful. My daughter is just learning to read and she was able to tackle this book with some help from me. She didn’t understand what the word “bare” meant but the accompanying picture of a brown tree with no leaves helped illustrate it.
There are definitely gaps in the story for caregivers to fill in, but the text does a good job of telling young readers what happens in winter and how snow forms. “Clouds are crystals of ice….The specks of ice and dust cling to one another. They… drop from the cloud. Snow!” Later, it tells of how the snow melts and waters the earth just in time for spring.
The illustrations are cartoonish and cute but do a great job of adding to the story. The trees appear to sway in the wind, the dog looks like he’s trudging through the snow, footprints appear behind the pair, and large clumps of snow flutter through the air. There’s lots of blue and white in the pictures. It really paints a great portrait of wintertime.
We didn’t see very much snow this year so I think my daughter felt a little shortchanged. Reading this book seems to have inspired her a little to look forward to next winter. She’s three and a half and seems fascinated by the changing of the seasons and the passage of time (she’s been asking about the days of the week and the months of the year). So reading this book together, added some tangible details to our discussions. I have to say that I learned a few things from this book as well. Although somewhere in the back of my head I probably knew snowflakes have six sides, I didn’t remember it until I read this book with my daughter. I was also under the impression that “no two snowflakes are alike.” Well, apparently, a researcher disproved that and found two identical snowflakes.
Overall impression
This is a really nice, informative nonfiction book for a beginning reader. It works as a short laptime book, too, for preschoolers. My 3 ½ year old enjoyed it.
Snow
Written by Marion Dane Bauer
Illustrated by John Wallace
Published by Aladdin in 2003
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