このところ,女の子向けの絵本シリーズについても,いろいろ調べていた。

ファンクラブのサイトや著者のインタビューなどまで読んで,なんだか面白そうだし,年齢的にもうちの子に合ってるんじゃないかと,もう少しで買いそうになっていたJunie B. Jone'sのシリーズについて,amazon.comで次の読者評を読んだことで,はやる気持ちに冷や水を浴びせられた。以下,対照的な2つを引用する。


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226 of 282 people found the following review helpful:
I'm sorry, but I just don't get it..., September 14, 2003

Reviewer: DTG "dtg9000" (New Haven, CT) - See all my reviews

This is apparently a minority opinion, but I think these books are horrible for children in the 1st or 2nd grade. Schools seem to love them - is there some special highly-technical educational matrix that this junk fits into that I need a degree in education to understand? My 1st-grade daughter reads everything, and on her second day her teacher recommended "The Dirty, Smelly Bus". We read it together, and I had to stop every other sentence and talk about how we don't call people stupid, how we don't judge others by the fact that you can beat them up, how you don't deal with being afraid by calling everyone names and hitting them, and how you don't go rummaging through other people's belongings and taking whatever you want. It's ridiculous. Not only is this behavior normal for the title character, there are no negative repercussions - it's considered "cute"!!. Perhaps the point is to get parents to spend time teaching kids how not to behave - but we get enough of that from real-life. There will be plenty of time for our children to become discriminating readers who know when they're reading a fun book - but at this age,at this stage, they are learning how to behave around others. When these books are encouraged by adults, a 1st-grader can't be blamed for thinking this is encouraged behavior. I think it's disingenuous for the literary review to flippantly say "don't try this grammar at home!" -- there's much worse in here than bad grammar for children of this age. Save the books for older readers, when they can actually understand the joke. Avoid the incorrect assumption that many adults (myself included at times)sometimes make that their young children have a higher level of sophistication than they really do.

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22 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

Motivation in the Classroom, June 1, 2002

Reviewer: Tracy Robert (Albuquerque, NM United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)

This series is a runaway hit, which explains why there are so many of them! This series is a must have for any primary (kindergarten-third grade) classroom. Junie B. Jones' kindergarten grammar defines her impatient, excited, five year old personality. I loved reading these books aloud to primary students. They lend themselves to fast speech, a foot stomp of impatience, and expressive reading for those who enjoy reading aloud. I would only need to read one Junie B. Jones book to first or second graders, and the rest would jump off of the classroom shelves. I would have to ask students to take copies out of their desks if I wanted to read another one aloud to the class. Students don't take Junie B. Jones' personality or misadventures seriously. They are wonderfully wacky and entertaining to a child's mind. What IS serious is that these books get young students eager to read chapter books. I have seen many first graders choose Junie B. Jones as their first chapter books. My students and I loved these books so much that classroom copies became worn, and I am now purchasing new copies for my personal collection. If your child has Junie B. Jones books that they enjoyed and have outgrown, make sure they don't want to keep them, then, pass them along to a primary teacher!