ED, ER, & ING

Happy Endings: A Story about Suffixes

Written by Robin Pulver

Published by Scholastic Inc.

Copyright 2011

26 Pages

Juvenile Fiction

 

Honestly, I chose to read this book out of pure curiosity. The story was not as good as I had hoped it would be. The story seems to be centered around the ends of words and children in classroom learning about them. With the word endings being highlighted a different color I found the entire book rather difficult to read. The story starts off with children that are excited about the school year coming to an end, so their teacher Mr. Wright decides to teach them about suffixes because they will need to know them for their next school year. Well, some of the words decide to jumble themselves up and have their endings come at the beginning, and that made the book very hard to read at certain points. The main purpose of this book was to show how important suffixes are and to encourage the young readers as they tackle their word endings in the future. I think that it served a purpose, it just wasn’t that great of a story book.

The images in this book look like a painting by an elementary student. The images also serve a purpose in assisting the student to be engaged in the book. The simple painting sets them at ease, because initially they can already relate. The different colored parts of words help the student visualize the difference in words and word endings.

         

This book could clearly be used in a Literacy Lesson to teach about word endings. The students could divide into groups and each be assigned a page of the book. Each group would pick out the suffixes and write them out on paper. Once they wrote out the suffixes, they could change the prefix to make a new word. Depending on their level, the students could even take it a step farther and write their own story with their new made up words. The book has not received any awards.