Tuesday, September 12, 2017

REVIEW: If You Were Me and Lived in…Mexico and If You Were Me and Lived in…Colonial America by Carole P. Roman

We really enjoyed our selections last year, so we looked forward to reviewing If You Were Me and Lived in…Mexico and If You Were Me and Lived in…Colonial America by Carole P. Roman.


WHAT IS IT?:


If You Were Me and Lived in…Mexico is part of the Introduction to Cultures Around the World series, which is written with children ages 4-8 and even slightly older in mind.  It’s available for just $11.99.  This is a very light introduction to places, things, and terminology related to living in Mexico.



If You Were Me and Lived in…Colonial America is part of the Introduction to Civilizations Throughout Time series, which is written with children ages 8-15 in mind.  It’s available for just $10.10.  It makes excellent supplemental reading for your history studies, as it gives a lot of detail about what it was actually like for a child growing up in that time period in history.


In addition, I received two other books for much younger children.  Although they were too young for my kids, I enjoyed looking through them. 

I Want to Do Yoga Too is $8.99 and is a delightful story about a little girl wants so badly to go to yoga classes with her mom instead of playing inDSCF4893 the children’s room at the studio.  She soon learns that she didn’t need to be in the class to learn some yoga, too, and it doesn’t even feel like learning! 

Pepper Parrot’s Problem with Patience is $9.99 and is a funny little story of a boy’s imagination that takes him on a pirate adventure.  In the story, he gets to help a friend learn the difference between right and left with a clever little trick, and the friend learns patience in the process.  This story is a great way to help your little pirate learn the same valuable lessons.


OUR EXPERIENCE:

Although my son will be 10 later this year, we were interested in reading If You Were Me and Lived in…Mexico because we just recently made a big cross-country move from Virginia to northern Texas.  There is a high concentration of Mexican residents in this area, and everywhere we go, we hear people speaking Spanish!  So I thought Holden would really enjoy learning a little bit about life in Mexico and the culture of its people.

This book gives a very light introduction to some of places in Mexico such as its capital city, its attractions, its food, and special holidays.  It also uses some Spanish DSCF4894words that children there might use, such as how they would address their parents, what their money is called, and what some typical Mexican names for boys and girls might be.

It has beautiful, full-color illustrations that fill an entire page opposite some simple sentences printed in a large font to create an attractive 2-page spread every time you turn the page.  The illustrations are cute and keep a child’s interest.  Even the unfamiliar foreign words have a simple pronunciation guide in parentheses next to each term so that a child can even read the story for themselves.  It also makes a great read-aloud, which is how we used it. 

Holden got to see that although their culture may be different from ours, life there is also similar in that they have special celebrations, eat their fDSCF4895avorite foods, and go to school just like us.  He is currently studying the Spanish language for school, and when the little map of Mexico showed up indicating the Mexican capital of Mexico City, he blurted out that he recognized it from his current Spanish lesson, where he is learning to map some key locations!  So this book really was a great tie-in for his studies.  I think it would be particularly well-suited to a child in the recommended age range, but we also enjoyed it very much.

I also received If You Were Me and Lived in…Colonial America, which we got to review last year.  We’ve finished our colonial studies and are now studying the expansion into the great American west, so we enjoyed revisiting this book again.  Take a look at my previous review to see just how much we loved this story!  This book lets your child have a glimpse into colonial life.  This historical series is chock full of information and details of what it was actually like for a child to live and grow up in the given time period.  These are truly great resources for your history studies! 

And if you have much younger children, do check out the other two stories I mentioned…they are just so cute!

Take a look at what other Crew members had to say about these and other book selections from Carole P. Roman by clicking the banner below.

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