A First Thesaurus (Adventures in Literacy Ser)

An easy-to-use thesaurus for younger children, offering alternatives to many over-used words in children's writing. Each section demonstrates, through illustrations, the context in which each word is used. The introduction explains how to use conjunctions, adverbs, collective nouns, and more.

Reviewed with Ruth Thomson's A First Word Bank.

Gr. K-3. These highly visual books in the Words for Writing/Adventures in Literacy series make children active participants in learning through a clever partnership of thumb-nail pictures with mostly single-word captions. In Word Bank, for younger children, themed sections introduce vocabulary and simple concepts (telling time, school equipment, tools) and provide kids with a sampler of simple sentences and useful words (mostly verbs) to help them build their own sentences and theme-related stories. Thesaurus, for children developing their writing skills, leads off with an explanation of a thesaurus and a minigrammar, followed by a picture-text sampler of colorful or more precise alternatives to 32 commonly used words, such as ate and bad. Some older kids will find the highly visual approach babyish, and some pictures simply don't work (in Word Bank the term restaurant is accompanied by a picture of a boy sitting at a table eating ice cream). For the most part, however, these fun, instructive choices show the beauty and variety of our language and give youngsters a very clear idea of how words can work for them. Stephanie Zvirin
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