Lauren McNiven

"Schools in Different Places" is a non-fiction book that talks all about what school looks like in different places around the world. It talks about the school buildings, rules and responsibilities, subjects, and transportation too and from school. This book would be great for fourth and fifth grades students as it has a higher level vocabulary including words like Judaism, Bon Jour, Muslim and more. One text feature that is so amazing is the last page of the book has a glossary of boldfaced words in the text that also includes their pronunciation as well as part of speech. It also has a text box describing what a noun vs. an adjective is. This could be a great pre-reading page to look at before students dive into the story. It also has a page designed for educators including an objective, main concepts in the story, discussion prompts, activity suggestions, and links to learn more about the topic. These are some really amazing tools I could see myself using in the classroom and other teachers using as a reference when looking at this book with their students. This could be a higher level guided reading book that could be used to analyze culture and world-perspectives.… (mer)