What I Didn't Read When I Went Swimming Instead

So I more or less didn't read a book yesterday, so today I read two, which means the books were short. 

Today's theme was American History, largely because I did a professional development a couple of years ago in which we received a whole bunch of nonfiction history picture books. I am just now getting around to reading through the ones I haven't read yet, which is a lot of them. Which is also pretty sad. 

The first book is What's the Big Idea, Ben Franklin?, by Jean Fritz. I started this last night at the movies, but decided that even if I was reading during the commercials before the previews start, it was rude to my boyfriend, who was nice enough to not say anything. 

Anyway, this book was in the same kind of series as Why Don't You Get a Horse, Sam Adams? The style and illustrations were very much the same as Sam Adams. I enjoyed the book, and many of my opinions about the other book hold true. This teaches me an important thing about reviewing series books like this: they're pretty much the same. True, the information is different, but the style and format are all pretty much the same. I'll remember this when I get around to The Magic Treehouse. 

The second book I read was A Picture Book of Lewis and Clark. This book is part of a series by David A. Adler (of Cam Jansen fame) about different historical figures. I checked in with a consultant (aka: my sister, who majored in history, and is therefore an expert), and the information is pretty accurate. This is actually something that is pretty reliable about Adler -he does his research and makes sure he's accurate. I saw him speak at the same professional development where I got the book, and he talked about his research process. He said that the reason he's never written a historical fiction book (until recently) was because he always questioned the accuracy of the stories, since he knew they didn't really happen. 

The illustrations in the book are pretty interesting, but since I'm not so great with the visual arts, I'm going to do a pretty poor job of describing them. But here goes: they look like water color paints, with light, gentle brush strokes, leaving wavy lines and faded faces. This leaves the reader with the sense of pulling an image out of their memory: not really able to see details, but able to get the overall picture.

How'd I do with that?

This book in particular I want to use next year with my fourth graders. They read a Lewis and Clark story as part of our reading curriculum (Lewis and Clark and Me), plus the fourth grade social studies theme is Geography of the United States, so I could use the book for either part. Probably the social studies piece, since I don't really want to read a book so that we can read a book. Maybe. We'll see. I'll report back later.