Hurry up Molly : Apurate, Molly

This charming bilingual book offers a simple, appealing illustrated story for preschoolers. Full-color illustrations on every page come with easy lines of text--a line for English with its translation into Spanish on the same page.

K-Gr 2-These two easy-readers are intended to help parents teach their children to speak Spanish, but their usefulness is questionable. The stories are simple. Puppy can't find anyone to play with until he meets a white mouse. In Molly, a young girl's father urges her through the process of getting ready for bed, only to fall asleep first. The texts are laid out around rather bland cartoon illustrations, with the English above and the Spanish below. Adults are encouraged to read the story in English, look at the picture dictionary at the end of each book, and practice the Spanish pronunciation given for key words. They are then instructed to go back and read the story aloud in English and Spanish, progressively moving toward reading solely in Spanish. Both the introductory text and the picture dictionary tell parents and teachers not to worry if their pronunciation is not right. It is almost a given that it won't be, since there are instances in which the phonetic pronunciations are incorrect, specifically in terms of designating inflected syllables. Indeed, use of the phonetic pronunciations without some knowledge of Spanish-letter sounds yields a sort of brutalized pidgin that is only remotely identifiable as spoken Spanish. Better to use these books in the reverse situation as instructional readers for young ESL students. The simple story lines and almost word-for-word equivalence of the texts make these ideal beginning-to-read books for children first encountering English.-Ann Welton, Terminal Park Elementary School, Auburn, WA

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