Children's books

Book 1: Germs are not for sharing by Elizabeth Verdick

Germs are not for sharing teaches students the social skills needed to not spread germs. The first component of the story that might affect a student’s comprehension is the idea of germs being something that they can share. We spend lots of time teaching students that sharing is something nice that they should do with their friends and then we read this book and tell them that they should not share. To help comprehension, students must first know what germs are and why they are bad to share. The second component that might affect comprehension is the instances when sharing germs would not be ok. The instances (i.e. dropping food on the floor and then throwing it away) are very representative to the American culture. Students from places where food is scarce might not understand why we would want them to throw the food away after it is dropped on the floor. The third component that might affect comprehension is the placement of the text on the page. There is a lot going on in the picture and the text can be difficult to find. We would have to teach students different places to look for when locating text. The fourth component that might affect comprehension is the difficulty of the text. The content is very simple, but the readability level of the text is at a first grade reading level. Students will need to know very difficult sight words and phonetic concepts in order to read the story on their own without adult help.

Book 2: Llama llama misses mama by Anna Dewdney

Llama llama misses mama contains several components that might affect student comprehension. The first component is the layout of the text on each page. The text appears at all levels around the illustrations. To help students with this component, I would have to teach students how to look at the top of the page first, and then the middle and then the bottom in order to not get the lines of text mixed up. The second component that might affect comprehension is the author’s use of uncommon words that allows the book to maintain a rhyming pattern. I would have to teach students to look at the illustration to try to decipher words such as chugga-choo and fuss. The third component that might cause some problems is the uncommon grammatical marks that the author uses. When reading alone, students would need to know what an ellipsis is and what a dash means in order to read with fluency and not interfere with comprehension.