Review to share!

Below is a review of Sassy Pants by Pamela Swearingen on her home school curriculum reviews blog. If you have friends who home school please pass this along. I remember my teaching days—you are always in the market for an interesting reader! Each book comes with a free audio version, aka, a good distraction on a long car ride! For more curriculum reviews: http://mustardseedhomeschool.blogspot.com The second book of the Sassy Pants series, Sassy Pants Makes Amends, will be coming out toward the end of 2011! Sassy Pants learns how to fix a friendship when she is the one who broke it!

Sassy Pants by Carol Brown

The book Sassy Pants by Carol Brown is a short easy-reader book that chronicles the misadventures of one aptly named pig, Sassy Pants. Once the pitiful runt of a litter of 19 piglets, Sassy Pants spends infanthood in home of the farmer where life is easy and the food is good. After gaining weight and growing a huge self-serving attitude, Sassy Pants is sent back to the barnyard where she begins to bully all of the other barnyard animals. Although she feels very entitled to live out her whims and desires, in the end Sassy Pants does learn a lesson about where she truly belongs and about what her place is in barnyard society.

For adults reading Sassy Pants, this elementary-aged reader is clearly about much more than a mischievous little pig in the barnyard. By anthropomorphising Sassy Pants, Carol Brown has created a farm world kids can easily understand, but with many complex issues hidden not-so-deeply inside. A few of the many topics touched in this short book include selfishness, bullying, different kinds of "sorry" and respecting boundaries.

To help parents and teachers highlight Sassy Pants' very human lessons, author Carol Brown has created a 3-page study manual which outlines several Talking Points on Sassy Pants' important lessons. The Teaching Manual can be downloaded for free at: Sassy Pants Parent/Teacher Manual.

At the end of the book, Sassy Pants learns her lessons the hard way and the barnyard animals purposefully don't console her. A sensitive child might really feel sorry for Sassy Pants in the end. So for this "tough love" reason, the Teaching Points in the Parent/Teacher Manual really are important. Kids might need to talk about Sassy Pants and the consequences of her naughty actions.

Pages: 78
Year originally published: 2010
You might want to know: This book is the first in a series of four books.
Source: In exchange for an honest review, I received a complimentary copy of this book and the downloadable parent/teacher manual directly from the author but the opinions stated here are all mine.