Kathryn Clay

Recommended by the PLA Early Literacy calendar

There's a brief introduction to ASL, an alphabet chart for fingerspelling, a glossary, and additional resources. Like many early ASL books, the vocabulary here is almost entirely nouns; readers might learn how to sign "sandcastle" but not "do you want to build a sandcastle?" Additionally, the cartoonish character illustrating the signs has a huge head but very small hands, so it's sometimes difficult to tell exactly how the sign should look.

I enjoyed this book even though I am not a football fan which to me says it was a well written book.

I liked this book for two reasons. This book was an informational text that explained what tap dancing was and the steps and moves that are involved in this kind of dance. I liked how the book was written. There were subheadings for each important break in the text. This made the story more organized and easier to follow. Also, a table of contents allowed the reader to reference a specific part quickly, while a glossary defined a difficult word for the reader. For example, the word show more “recital” was used in the text and if the reader did not know what a recital was, they could go to the back of the text into the glossary and find out that it is “a show where people dance for others.” A second thing I liked about this book was the nonfiction aspect of it. The book was organized, while being engaging and helpful for the reader’s learning. The images and the clear sections of the book made this text very useful. The big idea of this story was to explain and inform the reader about tap dancing. show less

The one aspect of the book I didn't like is that the book contains all females, no males are in any of the pictures.
This only contributes to the stereotype.