Squirrel Kits
From the Series Forest Babies
In Squirrel Kits, emergent readers learn about baby squirrels in the forest. Carefully crafted text uses high-frequency words, repetitive sentence patterns, and strong visual references to support emergent readers, ensuring reading success by making sure they aren’t facing too many challenges at once.
Squirrel Kits includes tools for teachers as well as introductory nonfiction features such as labels, a table of contents, words to know, and an index.
Squirrel Kits is part of Jump!’s Forest Babies series.
Reviews
Series Made Simple
New readers are the intended audience for these short and simple titles. Most sentences consist of a repeated pronoun plus a verb. The words on three spreads from Deer Fawns, for example, are: “It hides. It eats. It drinks.” The intentionally basic and repetitive language is a good fit for beginning readers. The narrative works in most cases. Owlets is less successful because the text seems to indicate a single animal, while the photos clearly show different owls in action. Highly appealing photographs heighten interest and appeal. Skunks at play, a staring owlet, and four climbing bear cubs are especially engaging examples, though a photo of an empty tree in Squirrel Kits acts only as filler. VERDICT Strong animal-oriented choices for kids just learning to read.
