[.ca] Ladybug's Birthday (ISBN 0590025996)

Ladybug's Birthday:
Since I am an elementary school teacher, I always buy my nephew theme presents for his birthday. I happened upon this book while looking for an offbeat fiction book about ladybugs. It was surprisingly entertaining. The plot is very positive as ladybug's friends take turns solving problems they have caused by bringing additional guests to her birthday party.The text is kid-pleasing with lots of alliteration (family of flighty fireflies, sprinkling of spindly spiders, etc)and predictable language. The illustrations are simple, yet bright and eye-catching. It is part of a Scholastic series called "Side by Side, Books for collaborative reading". According to Scholastic, "the structure of the text encourages taking turns because it combines a read-aloud book with an emergent reader, which results in true collaborative reading". Although the emergent text has been highlighted, is much larger than the read-aloud text, and is isolated on the left hand page, I'm not sure how well this book would work as a true emergent text. The reading levels rise sharply after the very simple introductory pages. This is a small quibble as the language is engaging and predictable and young children love to chime in to "read" a book whether that involves true reading (decoding the words) or merely repeating memorized words. The book has 29 pages so would be most appropriate for children aged 4-6.