Just A Second

Just a Second is my favorite Steve Jenkins book. It talks about what happens to things in a second, minute, hour, day, month, and year. This information picture book also discusses what happens extremely quickly and what takes and extremely long time. One of my favorite parts about the book is that in the back of the book, it includes different graphs that organizes things like the history of the universe or the life span of plants and animals. Another feature that I really like about this book it that it continues some of the facts and information through a day, month, and year and explains what happens along the way. This is very interesting and intriguing book that puts time into perspective for students. It gives the students a different way to look at time and put the rest of the world around them into a new perspective. 

For this book, I would want my students to do an activity that is called analyzing an informational text using a visual profile. In this activity, it has the students rate the nine elements of informational text and how prevalent or not it is in the book. This makes students think past the words and the pictures and think more about the features of the text. Another activity that I would like for my students to do using this book is to track something (anything they would like) on what happens to it in a second, minute, hour, day, month, and year. An example would be the students could look up what happens to trash when we do not dispose of it properly in a second all the way to a year or whenever it decomposes. It will give the students a better understanding of time. This informational picture book should be used with older elementary students because it has a lot of complex information that would be too hard for younger elementary students to understand. Overall, I really enjoyed the book and I think it would be a great addition to any classroom.

Just a Second

Author: Steve Jenkins

Year Published: 2011