Pen Pals

School Library Journal

Gr 2-5-These series titles are designed to encourage children's creativity. Pen Pals explains the whys and hows of communicating with someone via mail and e-mail and includes a section about safety. After presenting a brief history of the theater, Plays describes scripting, costumes, props, characters, and using voice and movement. Poetry discusses the basic elements of rhythm, rhyme, and repetition; introduces different types of poems; and offers suggestions for writing your own piece. Stories begins with the various kinds of writing (descriptive, persuasive, expository, and narrative), provides ideas for inspiration, and talks about editing and revising. All are concisely written and suggest ways to get started in each of these creative endeavors. Full-color photographs enhance the presentations. Because there are glossaries, the boldface vocabulary words that appear within the texts followed by the pronunciations in parentheses are distracting and unnecessary duplications. There's lots of fun here for motivated, imaginative readers.-Pamela K. Bomboy, Ches- terfield County Public Schools, VA Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.