Through the Looking Glass Children's Book Reviews
Punctuation Celebration
Illustrator: Jenny Whitehead
Poetry Picture Book
For ages 6 to 8
Henry Holt , 2009 ISBN: 978-0805079739
You are invited to a special event that is taking place in just a moment or two. The event is a “sporty exploration / Into words and punctuation.” During the event, you are going to meet all the forms of punctuation that people commonly use. Perhaps you are wondering why you need to make the acquaintance of the period, the comma, the colon, the question mark, and some of their friends. Well, the reason is quite simple. If you get to know them, then you will be able to mix words and punctuation with ease, creating stories, reports, and who knows what else.
Let’s begin with probably the easiest form of punctuation, the period. It is easy to use it because wherever a sentence ends, the period “comes and plops, / and where is plops, the sentence STOPS.” Periods are also used to abbreviate things when you don’t feel like spelling out street, dozen, or pound.
Next, there is that form of punctuation that looks so wonderful. The question mark is easy to place. All you have to do is to put it “after words that ask.”
In this very clever poetry picture book, the author helps young readers and writers to understand when to use twelve different forms of punctuation. Each form of punctuation has a poem that explains how and when it should be used, and on the facing page, another little poem demonstrates how it is used in a piece of writing.
With lashings of clever humor, the author makes what could be a dry subject very accessible and entertaining. Jenny Whitehead’s multimedia illustrations compliment the poems, adding color, pizzazz, and visual interest to the pages.
