Swish! - Hardcover

Bill Martin, Jr. is the author of many noted books for children, among them the best-selling Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? He holds a Ph.D. in early childhood education and has long been a proponent of using rhyme and rhythm to teach young children how to read.

Michael Sampson is the author of The Football That Won and Star of the Circus. Mr. Sampson is a professor of education at Texas A&M University-Comerce.

Michael Chesworth has illustrated more than twenty-five books for young readers. He makes his home in Litchfield County, Connecticut.

Visit Bill Martin Jr his web site: www.billmartinjr.com

Kindergarten-Grade 3. With rhythmic rhyme and dynamic art, Swish! draws readers into the final minute of a hotly contested game between two girls' basketball teams, the Cardinals and the Blue Jays. The text echoes the fast-paced excitement of the game, punctuated by the slower "dribble...dribble...dribble" as each player decides where to place the ball. Both sides score and the red team calls a frantic time out, coming back to win with a three-pointer in the last second. Chesworth's drawings are full of motion. He zooms in from the first picture where the perspective is high in the bleachers, and then swoops down into the middle of the court with the team. Readers can nearly hear the gasping breaths and smell the sweaty uniforms in the struggle for that winning basket. The cartoonlike character of the pictures and the primary colors of the uniforms make this a bright and cheery choice for reading aloud to budding basketball enthusiasts. It makes an interesting contrast to the more serious tone and subdued colors of Robert Burleigh and Stephen Johnson's Hoops (Harcourt, 1997).?Connie C. Rockman, Stratford Library Association, CT
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