From Tadpole to Frog

As a new mom, I rarely bought informational texts for my oldest daughter. However, as I became a teacher and learned more about the value of balance with reading genres, I started to buy a wider range of texts. As a kindergartener and first grader I noticed that my oldest selected a lot of books about animals from her classroom library. As such, I frequently buy books about animals when Scholastic book orders arrive. From Tadpole to Frog, a level 1 Scholastic Reader was one of them. As a family we continue to enjoy informational texts, especially those related to science and social studies topics. 

The front cover provides glimpses into different stages of the life-cycle of a frog. When reading through the book, the photographs of the process dominate the pages, complemented by short sentences of text. The back cover outlines that level 1 of the Scholastic Reader set as including 50-250 words composed of "sight words, words to sound out & simple sentences." The words are in a larger sized font to further support emergent readers. 

When my daughter was first starting to read, books like this were perfect. She could feel successful reading the text, and then the photos provoked a lot of discussion, weaving in other prior knowledge that she had about whichever topic was featured. It is always ideal to consider a range of books for classroom libraries. This would be a good addition to a text set. While other books could be for teacher read alouds or small group settings, this would be an appropriate book for emergent readers, both those who read the words and those who read the pictures. 

The text also provides an introduction to informational text features, albeit in a limited way. There is one label to accompany a photograph, the word gills and lines to indicate where they are on the frog on page 11. In addition six key words/phrases are in bold in the text and there is an accompanying glossary in the back of the text. However, the words within the text are white, and for young readers who are not familiar with bold fonts, I wonder if they would notice the subtle difference. Nonetheless, that is where others can draw their attention to the text features that support their understanding. The simplicity of the text features complements the overall purpose of the book well.