Grammar Picture-Book Recommendations
By Lisa Von Drasek

For Lisa Von Drasek's latest article Grammar's Makeover click here

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Two titles that have been an unexpected success in our fifth-grade classrooms are The Perfect Pop-Up Punctuation Book by Kate Petty and Jennie Maizels (Dutton, 2006, ISBN: 0-525-47772-1) and an earlier title by the same authors, The Amazing Pop-Up Grammar Book (Dutton, 1996, ISBN: 0-525-45580-9). The densely packed interactive pages feature tiny lift-the-flap, pop-up backgrounds, moveable tabs and novelty parts.

On the verb page of The Amazing Pop-Up Grammar Book, those action words cause action: Swimmers swim, frogs jump and divers dive. Anyone looking for a vivid example of an adjective can move one sheep and the other sheep on the page is transformed from a red sheep to striped sheep, from patterned to spotted sheep. This volume covers the usual suspects: nouns, pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, prepositions, and conjunctions. My favorite page is the portrait gallery of plurals. Each noun is pictured singular, then when we lift the flap we see the multiple animals and the corresponding form – one fish becomes three fish and one calf transforms to three calves.

The Perfect Pop-Up Punctuation Book examines forms of punctuation, picturing each one, defining usage in a graphic interactive representation. "Every sentence begins with a CAPITAL letter...and ends with a period." The sentences transform at the pull of a tab. There is a picture of a large, round period, then we lift the flap and a train runs down a track accompanied by the sentence, "The train has stopped." "See how the train and the sentence both come to a stop." The most interesting spread demonstrates parentheses: "Parentheses go around extra information in a sentence." When we lift the flap, a big yellow crane literally lifts the parenthetical phrase out of the sentence, demonstrating that the overall meaning has not changed.

For Lisa Von Drasek's latest article Grammar's Makeover click here

For Lisa Von Drasek's latest audiobook recommendations click here

Lisa Von Drasek is Children's Librarian at the Bank Street College of Education in New York, NY.

March, 2007, Vol.37, No.6