HAPPY ENDINGS

The team that taught students about nouns and verbs, punctuation and silent letters now tackles suffixes…almost literally. On the last day of school, when Mr. Wright announces, “After lunch and our read-aloud, we’ll tackle word endings,” the anthropomorphized suffixes head to the gym to get into shape for the coming melee. Meanwhile, the kids’ atrocious behavior in the lunchroom leads Mr. Wright to skip the read-aloud and go directly to the lesson. Except the lesson has disappeared. Threatened with no summer vacation unless they find the word endings, the kids hang (suffix-less) wanted posters all over the school. Reassured of the students’ good intentions, the suffixes leave clues for them to decode and thus find them, saving not only the kids’ educations but summer vacation as well. As in the previous titles, the words in the text are printed in two colors, allowing the suffixes to stand out from the rest of the text. Reed’s now-signature acrylic-and-digital illustrations are as quirky and colorful as ever. Backmatter includes a page of spelling rules for adding endings to words and a page delineating some different suffixes and how their additions change the root word. While this may not be as strong as the previous titles from this duo, still it is a good addition to their language-arts series. (Picture book. 6-8)