Growing up in South Africa; Toads and Their Young

These demonstration big books, based on existing ones in smaller format, provide direct help to teachers concerned to cover the genres prescribed for the Literacy Hour. Each book has a useful summary of the content and structure on the back cover and teacher and children might well turn to this first and use it as a starting point to formulate some of their own questions to take to their reading.

Growing up in South Africa, about the life of five year old Siphe, is a delightful introduction to both geography and autobiographical writing: picture books based round photographs found in library collections rarely achieve a perfect integration between verbal and visual input and so it is good to see that these photographs have been taken specially. Young children will be able to relate to and compare what happens in Siphe’s world to their everyday experiences and there are exciting possibilities for their own first person writing. The introduction invites children to dip into parts of the book that interest them.
However I think a momentum builds up and children will enjoy reading the pages in sequence.

Toads and Their Young is one of a series for 4-7 year olds which demonstrates the features of report as well as imparting much interesting information about creatures. Photographs are large enough for a whole class to see well, but some sense of scale would have been helpful – perhaps achieved by life size representations of eggs, tadpoles and toads at the foot of some of the pages. The book lacks the appeal to the imagination of some rival nature books but even so it is a useful resource for modelling features of non-narrative text.