Children’s Literature Evaluation Form

Your Name: Joanna Simon

Book Title: Living sunlight: How Plants Bring the Earth to Life
Author: Molly Bang and Chisholm Penny
Genre: Informational
Illustrator: Scholastic
Publisher/Year: 2009
Evaluate the Book for the following elements
Style and Language: Using examples for the book, explain the following: Word
choices, dialogue, rhythm, rhyme and sentence length. Share unexpected insights or
interesting information the reader learns from this story. (5 points)
The author uses short text to explain what is going on through the illustration with no
rhyme or dialogue between other characters. The sun plays a big role on Earth where
it explains what it can do, for instance, helping plants grow and helping us breathe.
Character: With examples from the book, provide the following- (5 points)
Who is the main character?
How can the reader relate to the character?
Who are the supporting characters?
The main character is the sun.
The supporting characters are the plants.
The reader is able to relate to the character for instance being the oldest in a family
we play a big role when it comes to helping out our parents. Being the third parent
comes with a lot of responsibility.
Plot: Summarize the major events of the story (6 points)
The book gives an idea of how important the sun is and how much we rely on it to
help us live. We rely on plants to absorb water from the Earth where they use the
sun’s energy to release hydrogen and oxygen into the Earth. Plants make sugar to
build their parts. As humans, the sun becomes a helpful resource for instance we rely
on the Earth to provide food and light.
Setting: Explain the place and time of this book. (2 points)
Theme: What is the main message of this book? (2 points)
The message of the book teaches us the circle of life using the sun as a useful key in
our life and how useful it really is.
The setting of the book takes in the current time explaining to the reader why the sun
appears every morning.
Illustration: Analyze the book you selected with the following categories
Style (realism, surrealism, expressionism, impressionism, naïve, cartoon art)? (2
points)
Realism, surrealism, Impressionism
Media Choice (paints, oils watercolors, pencils, pen, charcoal, crayons, acrylic, chalk):
(2 points)
Pen, crayons, pencils
Give examples of describe how the following visual elements are used in the
illustrations: (3)
Line: straight, curvy
Shapes: circles,
Color: Blue, yellow, orange, white, green
Texture: soft and smooth
Page design (placement of the illustrations, use of borders, white and dark space and
all pages the same or different). (3)
The placement of the illustrations takes most of the book where the text is located on
top. Borders are included in current pages to separate illustrations from other
illustrations.

Child Development Theory: Choose either Piaget, Erickson or Social Emotional to

describe the connection to the book Chose 1 only (5 points)
Piaget:
Name the stage Formal Operational and the age 12yrs and older
Explain the cognitive development from this stage and provide an example from the
book to support your choice:

Your rating of the book: 3

Why?
My reasoning for rating this book high is the author does a good job incorporating
science into a children’s book making it an interesting and fun learning experience.
Kids are able to learn while reading a book with a lot of illustrations giving them an
idea of how important the sun is.