 |
|
|
| Customer Review: |
|
1: Great Read Aloud for young kids (4+) that teaches real science
Andrew is a child genius inventor. His inventions take his cousin Judy and him on various adventures. Each adventure lasts four books (each book is almost always 75 pages) and it is possible to read adventures out of order. The books are filled with scientific facts: the author is an established biology children's textbook writer. I personally learned a lot of neat science from the books. Don't think these books are dry, Greenburg mixes in interesting facts throughout the adventure.
The Andrew Lost series has the potential to really turn a young child into a scientist. If you start reading aloud books like this early, age 4 and 5, you may grow a future scientist.
|
2: Really great for science-minded kids
My 6-year old son is hooked on these stories, all of them! He likes them better than Magic Tree House. The science learning comes in fun and funny ways and is not so "obvious." You learn so much (adults included!) by seeing common things at the microscopic level.
The one problem I've had is that they mostly need to be read in order. I didn't realize that when we began in the middle with the book that looked most appealing to my child.
|
3: Teacher's Grade: C+
I've been teaching 2nd grade for a dozen years now, and have had lots of experience reading and evaluating books for children. This book presented some difficulty because it didn't lend itself well to being read aloud.
1) The dialogue is stilted with too many exclamation points and the sentences are artificially choppy. I understand the length of the sentences has to be short due to the target audience's reading level, but there should be more attention paid to the quality of the sentences.
2) The scientific facts included in the book are top-notch. Judith Greenburg did yeoman work in researching her facts. Unfortunately, much of the science is lost due to frantic action scenes and the choppy dialogue mentioned above.
3) One of the supporting characters is a robot named Thudd. Thudd speaks like a 2-year old. Thudd makes the diction used by Junie B. Jones appear to be of a collegiate level. When reading a book aloud to 2nd graders, I don't expect to have to explain what a character is saying because the character is talking like a baby.
I strongly disliked this book.
My 7 year-old son liked it a lot.
The bottom line is that it's more important for my 7 year-old to like what he's reading than it is for me to like it. I'll let my son read these at home, but I won't be using them in my classroom.
|
4: My son loves these books
My son (age 6 1/2) loves reading this series. He reads them to himself, he reads them to his siblings, he reads them to his grandparents. He can't get enough of them.
One suggestion is to purchase them in sets because although the stories are self-contained, there are aspects of them that are connected. For example the first fours books (1-4) deal with adventures involving a shrinking machine, the second set (5-8) deal with underwater pursuits.
Highly recommend!
|
5: Matthew's review
This was a good book because it had true facts about dogs. One of the facts was that dogs can find something buried under the snow because they can sense heat. It was a little bit funny when Judy thought that the Atom sucker was a gadget to explode stuff and she said that it would explode her helicopter. I would recommend this as a good book.
|
|
|
