Customer Reviews

Get Dressed (Small World)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Recommended by a Montessori link, this series of books is outstanding. It portrays real children in their native or celebratory clothes from various countries and continents. My 21- month old loves this book and all others from this series. There is a bit of information on the last page about each picture, which will be useful once he is older. I can talk about the continent/country where the picture was taken, why the child is bundled up or dressed loosely, etc. It can serve as an opener to discuss other topics, such as poverty and war, since there are also pictures of children in homeless shelters and refugee camps. I see a lot of potential for future use.

The reason why I call this one of the few good children's books, is because most books include non-natural depictions of inane characters, animals, cartoons of imaginary creatures, etc. For a very young child, it is questionable whether they can distinguish reality from fantasy, and the real world is quite fascinating to them anyway, so why clog their mind with such rubbish?

The only complaint I have is the somewhat tepid rhyme, but I usually talk about the pictures in my own words and ignore the text.

This is wonderful collection of books by Gwenyth Swain. These are a must have for any earlychildhood educator or parent of young children. This book shows children from around the world in their different outfits with simple
text. In the back of the book there are some great extensions for activities that extend the experience of reading. Check out her others Bedtime! Carrying, Celebrating, Eating, Smiling, Tidy Up!, Wash Up!, and Eating.

This book is an essential in a classroom with ELLs. The pictures will tap their background knowledge and the simplicity allows them to master the language quickly. The questions in the text can be used to teach that sentence structure. The text accompanying the index can also be taught.

I was really disappointed in this book, because I was hoping to get the whole series for my 4-year-old. It has just one sentence per page, such as "Lace up your shoes," and while each photo is of a child who appears to be from another culture (some are western, too), there's no information on that page about the picture. In the back, there's a reference, describing each picture with a couple of sentences, ("A girl from Iran wears a hijab...") but my four-year-old doesn't want to wait while I page through to the back, hold the place with my finger, read the description, then flip back to look at the picture... not to mention how it disrupts the flow of the story. I could just read the descriptions all together at the end, but it just doesn't work well. It would have been MUCH better to simply describe the cultures, children, and clothes throughout the book.