This illustrated, rhyming book for beginning readers helps preschoolers develop language skills.
In the first part of this book for emergent readers, friendly animals—a dog, sheep, and mouse—demonstrate the fun things that can be done with balls of various kinds. Balls can be big or small, bounce or roll, go up or down, make different noises, and so on. Animals juggle balls, play basketball, baseball, tennis, and other ball games. They go to the beach and the Ball House Café (with specials like “Matzo Ball Soup”). Children are invited to spell the word “ball” and to write it, whisper it, and shout it. Finally, the book suggests, you could grab a ball and play with a friend. Cheerful, colorful homemade-looking drawings help illustrate the concepts. Scanlon (My Toddler Talks: Strategies and Activities to Promote Your Child’s Language Development, 2012), a certified and licensed pediatric speech-language pathologist, asks parents to read the 17-page guide for parents before sitting down to read the book to children. The guide offers seven steps to success—e.g., “Focus on One Skill at a Time” or “Go on a Picture Walk”—while three action guides (on oral language, phonological awareness, and print awareness) offer examples, strategies, and exercises for enhancing reading readiness. Oral language, Scanlon says, can be improved through using an appropriate reading style (describer- or performance-oriented), making connections, providing synonyms and antonyms (examples are listed), and having children tell stories. Phonological awareness is also developed through attention to word sounds, such as rhyming and alliteration. To develop print awareness, parents can use strategies like following words with a finger while reading out loud and asking children why some words are bigger or colored a certain way. Also, several pages have blank spots for children to fill in information such as hometown or street address. All this may seem like overkill for a very simple book, but parents of children with language delays or anyone interested in language development will find this guide thorough and useful.
An amusing, educational book for kids and a helpful resource for parents.
Pub Date: April 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-1505343205
Page Count: 48
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
This guide to Black culture for White people is accessible but rarely easy.
A former NFL player casts his gimlet eye on American race relations.
In his first book, Acho, an analyst for Fox Sports who grew up in Dallas as the son of Nigerian immigrants, addresses White readers who have sent him questions about Black history and culture. “My childhood,” he writes, “was one big study abroad in white culture—followed by studying abroad in black culture during college and then during my years in the NFL, which I spent on teams with 80-90 percent black players, each of whom had his own experience of being a person of color in America. Now, I’m fluent in both cultures: black and white.” While the author avoids condescending to readers who already acknowledge their White privilege or understand why it’s unacceptable to use the N-word, he’s also attuned to the sensitive nature of the topic. As such, he has created “a place where questions you may have been afraid to ask get answered.” Acho has a deft touch and a historian’s knack for marshaling facts. He packs a lot into his concise narrative, from an incisive historical breakdown of American racial unrest and violence to the ways of cultural appropriation: Your friend respecting and appreciating Black arts and culture? OK. Kim Kardashian showing off her braids and attributing her sense of style to Bo Derek? Not so much. Within larger chapters, the text, which originated with the author’s online video series with the same title, is neatly organized under helpful headings: “Let’s rewind,” “Let’s get uncomfortable,” “Talk it, walk it.” Acho can be funny, but that’s not his goal—nor is he pedaling gotcha zingers or pleas for headlines. The author delivers exactly what he promises in the title, tackling difficult topics with the depth of an engaged cultural thinker and the style of an experienced wordsmith. Throughout, Acho is a friendly guide, seeking to sow understanding even if it means risking just a little discord.
This guide to Black culture for White people is accessible but rarely easy.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-80046-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
American schools at every level, from kindergarten to postgraduate programs, have substituted ideological indoctrination for education, charges conservative think-tanker Sowell (Senior Fellow/Hoover Institution; Preferential Polices, 1990, etc.) in this aggressive attack on the contemporary educational establishment. Sowell's quarrel with "values clarification" programs (like sex education, death-sensitizing, and antiwar "brainwashing") isn't that he disagrees with their positions but, rather, that they divert time and resources from the kind of training in intellectual analysis that makes students capable of reasoning for themselves. Contending that the values clarification programs inspired by his archvillain, psychotherapist Carl Rogers, actually inculcate values confusion, Sowell argues that the universal demand for relevance and sensitivity to the whole student has led public schools to abdicate their responsibility to such educational ideals as experience and maturity. On the subject of higher education, Sowell moves to more familiar ground, ascribing the declining quality of classroom instruction to the insatiable appetite of tangentially related research budgets and bloated athletic programs (to which an entire chapter, largely irrelevant to the book's broader argument, is devoted). The evidence offered for these propositions isn't likely to change many minds, since it's so inveterately anecdotal (for example, a call for more stringent curriculum requirements is bolstered by the news that Brooke Shields graduated from Princeton without taking any courses in economics, math, biology, chemistry, history, sociology, or government) and injudiciously applied (Sowell's dismissal of student evaluations as responsible data in judging a professor's classroom performance immediately follows his use of comments from student evaluations to document the general inadequacy of college teaching). All in all, the details of Sowell's indictment—that not only can't Johnny think, but "Johnny doesn't know what thinking is"—are more entertaining than persuasive or new.
Pub Date: Jan. 4, 1993
ISBN: 0-02-930330-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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