Carolyn Fisher

This review posted at The Children's Book and Media Review run by Brigham Young University.

In the Snow Show, Snow White, Chef Kelvin, and Jack Frost are live with a studio audience going to the North Pole to make a fresh batch of snow. The chefs talk about the ingredients needed to make snow, the instructions for making snow, and the types of snow that can be made. One of the chefs even goes through the process himself to show what is happening at each step of the journey to make snow.

In this book, readers will learn about how snow is made in an entertaining way. The process is written in big, fun letters and dialogue boxes around the page show what the characters are saying during the story to add some humor to the scientific facts. There is an afterward at the end by the author with more information about how snow is made, but the contents of the story itself are likely more than enough for most readers. The idea behind the book is fun, but the illustrations can sometimes be too chaotic and makes the book harder to understand along with understanding new science concepts.… (more)

The narrator of this book is Ellie, a single skin cell on "the derriere of a Boston terrier." It starts with the dictionary definition of a cell, which is a little too advanced for younger audiences, but the rest of the book has just a few facts on each page, and most are presented in ways that make it easy for kids to understand ("a cell is an itty-bitty building block that stacks together with other cells to make...dogs and...humans and...everything else that's alive!"). There is a huge variety of fonts and a lot of color, with no white space at all, making the book feel a little crowded sometimes. We'll come back to this one.

See also: The Brain is Kind of a Big Deal by Nick Seluk… (more)

I'll admit, when I started to read this book, I was not a fan. Most books have some order to them, but this book had words everywhere! It had me turning my head to read properly. Then I got to the part about how his father ask how things are with her mom, and then I realized what direction the book was going in. This book is truly about a family growing after a divorce, and something old turned into something new. I actually ended up really loving this book and the illustrations. It even has a mash potato recipe in the back of the book, which would be fun to do a lesson to do with my students!… (more)