John, Paul, George & Ben (2006)

This book is great to introduce the Presidents and other historical people, as People first, then they used their unique skills as our historical significant people. ( )

Absolutely delightful! Cleverly designed from the dust jacket to the final page with plenty of snarky fun throughout. The True/False section at the back makes clear the distinction between facts and fictions about these five founding fathers. The illustrations are caricature-like and filled with fun details related to each of the founding fathers. Looking for the scattered references to the other group including a John, Paul and George makes for a fun puzzle as well. ( )

This is a very cute and creative book, looking at the young lives of John Hancock, Paul Revere, George Washington, Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson before they were famous. While their child lives are fictional,the events reflect things they did later in life, and will help a child learn what each man did to contribute to history. The end of the book has a summary of what each man did and a true/false section to clear up any details in this book. While this sounds like an overwhelming amount of information, it is actually very simple and a cute story. Key words are bolded/all caps (ie Liberty, Happiness). Recommended for age 5+

Teaching Extension:
Read to a young class as an introduction to American History. ( )

This story is about the past presidents of America and explains some brief facts about each of them. I enjoy this biography because it has a lot of information condensed down into easy to understand pages. This book would be a great read for a fifth grader because not only are they getter some great historical information but this book is also a challenge for there reading skills.

“Once there were four lads: John, Paul, George, and Ben. [Wait] make that five lads. There was also independent Tom (always off doing his own thing).” In case you were wondering, we are talking about John Hancock, Paul Revere, George Washington and Benjamin Franklin. And of course independent Thomas Jefferson who is always off doing his own thing. This book is a hilarious take on five important people in our history and how they came to have such an impact on our country. It is the perfect book to teach children a little information about them because, with the way it is written, children will never know, until you point it out, that they have actually learned something.

The back of this book is also a treasure trove of knowledge. The last page contains a true or false section for the information in this book so you can determine what is factual and what is fiction.

The illustrations in this book are very cartoon-ish and use very basic shapes to forms the characters and backdrops for this story. They contain a darker, kind of “antiqued” color pallet that makes you believe they are illustrations of pictures that were taken more than 200 years ago. They match well with the over-sized text and make this a perfect book for story-time reading.