Irving Independent School District

The Blastoff! Reader titles are attractive, with colorful pages, a fairly uncluttered design, and clear, readable typeface. The Life Cycle of a Ladybug contains many important features of a nonfiction text, such as a title page, table of contents, glossary, index, bold print for important terms, and additional resources. One element which seems to have been slighted a bit is the caption. No picture in the entire book contains captions, although one picture is labeled. The book is factual and does a good job showing the life cycle of an organism which is NOT a frog or butterfly (the usual subjects) with concise text and great photographs. One drawback is that the text mentions the fact that ladybugs come in different colors and patterns but all photos of the insect are the basic red-with-black-spots variety. It would have been a good choice if some of these other varieties had been represented. Nevertheless, it’s a reliable source for K-2 research or as a nonfiction easy reader. In the back of the text there is a bibliography of a few additional textual resources and directions for using Fact Surfer to find additional web resources about the ladybug. The Blastoff! Readers seem to be hooked on the Fact Surfer search engine, providing the reader instructions for finding out additional information about the book’s topic. There’s no apparent way to find out who is behind the creation of the engine or any additional information about its purpose. Unfortunately, there’s nothing special about this search engine; only 6 results came up for the term “lady bug” and two of these were the printable craft variety of sites, not “scholarly” information such as might be found on World Book Kids or a comparable database . NetTrekker is a much better bet as a search engine.