Open your eyes to a world of discovery

This very well designed DK book is an informational text about rocks and minerals. I would use the skimming and scanning reading strategies with this book because there are topic headings that can be clearly found. I would use synthesizing reading strategy so that students can piece together information they learn from the text that teaches them about rocks and minerals. There are several words in bold and italics that can highlight new learning topics, and fact boxes that can be discussed as well as vivid photographs that connects with the text.

Caroline Bingham writes books on the topics of inventions and different things on the earth and why they work the way they do and gives a lot of information on things. The book I chose, Rocks and Minerals, is one of these books. The book starts out by going through the different types of rocks and minerals and showing the reader what certain rocks make up certain things around the world. This book is very informational and again, does not have a plot to it. There are several facts. On several pages there are questions that are asked along with the answer under it. From rocks it goes on to talk about different minerals and gems.
I myself really enjoyed going through this book. Not only did I learn a lot from the book but there are really good pictures to go with the text and what I was learning. Kids always do well with pictures. I think that having pictures when learning about something is a very good thing to do. It helps the students to process and understand the concept and it helps them to remember it better as well. Towards the end of the book it talks about some of the different kinds of rocks, minerals and metals that are used in everyday objects. I think this is an even better way to help the reader understand things. If a child can relate to something that he or she encounters on an everyday basis then they can see more easily what they are learning. I am a big fan of having some kind of glossary at the end of the book, especially books like this one. When it is an informational book there are going to be words that a child is not going to understand but has to be able to understand it in order to understand the concepts.

Good starter book for a child or study book for middle to high school. ( )