ME FIRST!

Once again looking in on the doings in Mr. Wright’s classroom, Pulver and Reed continue their language arts series with a look at prefixes.

Lumps of roughly formed clay with painted features and pipe-cleaner legs, the anthropomorphized prefixes are having trouble waiting until Mr. Wright gets around to his promised review of prefixes with his class. It also happens to be Leadership Day at the school, and Mr. Wright, dressed as Abraham Lincoln, is teaching his class about Lincoln’s life and the qualities that made him a good leader. Luckily, the prefixes learn a lot from this lesson, and their former bragging and boastfulness turn to humility. When it’s finally their turn to shine, they make sure the kids can see them around the room as the children complete their assignment: two sentences using prefixes about how they would help or make a difference as a leader. The many prefixes used and shoehorned into the text are set apart by capital letters (“UNsure,” “MISled”) so readers can easily pick them out, but unfortunately, the lesson on leadership detracts from the lesson on prefixes. Backmatter includes a definition of prefixes and a few more facts, and the endpapers feature 16 of the labeled prefix characters with their meanings and an example for each.

Not as strong as either Pulver and Reed’s others or Brian P. Cleary and Martin Goneau’s Pre- and Re-, Mis- and Dis- (2013).