Customer Reviews

More Stories Julian Tells (Stepping Stone, paper)

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An excerpt from this book, about African-American characters, was used January 31, 2,000 in a state-wide Illinois third-grade reading standards test. 70,000 Illinois children got this test excerpt, in which the testers reillustrated the story without permission and changed the characters to Causcasians. I wrote the book with great care, and with the hope that many children will identify with my characters who are courageous and successful and well-liked. Over 200,000 copies of the book have been sold. I know from my fan mail that many children of all races do identify with the characters. It must have been painful for many of them to see their heroes turned white on a test--and for others who know the book, it must have been distracting at the least. One of the testers' three new illustrations shows the brothers in the story playing baseball. Eight books about the characters have been published to date (there will be a new one next year)--and in none of them do the characters play baseball. The testers developed their test questions based on a 3-page excerpt from the book; they had never even seen a copy of the entire book (thus the error in race), much less read it. It's quite possible that a child who had read the book would give different answers to the test questions based on his knowledge, and that the testers, in their ignorance, would mark it wrong. In many states, statewide tests are very serious these days--children are stigmatized for low scores, and teachers lose their jobs. But it appears that the tests are hastily and thoughtlessly constructed and penalize good readers. Parents and all of us concerned with education need to know what kind of tests children are being subjected to. --anncameron@guate.net

I think it's a great book. So I want other people to read it. Because Julian tells lots of stories and it's lots of fun reading it.

I have read this book with my second and third graders for years. We have laughed over the cat-a-log cats and the trials of Julian with his younger brother and friend, Gloria. They are such good stories, we don't want them to end. When my kindergartener grandson read the caveman tooth story, he belly laughed. The complex surprising vocabulary is pure joy! I'd love to see Ann Cameron write more stories.