Review: A Book That is Supposed to Teach Children How to Pronounce Words, Yet Teaches Kids Saw instead of Soar
Rating: 1 out of 5
Date: 03 23, 2012
A Pocketful of Dinosaurs is a lot of different to most of Scott Gordon's other picture books, firstly by the fact it doesn't include the great computer still images by Julien Tormeur which is what usually lifts these picture books into a much higher league than the text.  A Pocketful of Dinosaurs has a mixture of more simple illustrations such as drawings of dinosaurs (Land Before Time style) imposed over the top of a pair of jeans pocket, to more realistic looking illustrations like the cover but with plants, water and other ecosystem stuff in the backgrounds, sort of like you'd find in a hardcopy thin junior non fiction book on dinosaurs.  A non fiction book is what this one is supposed to be, and that's where it fails.  Its goal is to teach children how to pronounce the names of various dinosaurs, yet no one seems to have proof read this to make sure it's correct.  Children are told to pronounce dinosaur Dine-O-Sawr.  Saw, really! Young kids will no doubt pronounce it that way, and we adults will go awww, isn't that cute! But a book about pronunciation should be teaching kids how to pronounce words correctly with the soar sound, not how to mispronounce something in a cute way. The mispronunciation lessons, especially with the saur part of the word are continued on with all the actual dinosaur names such as Brawn-tah-sawr-us, and Ti-ran-uhsawr-us. What different types of dinosaurs ate, and a theory for what wiped them out (comet hitting the earth and causing an ice age) is also included in this short picture book. But you just can't go past the w sound being introduced to words it doesn't exist in.Most of Scott Gordon's picture books are really good, this branching out into non fiction just didn't work.