Got Beaches? Next Stop: The Caribbean by Ginger McDonnell

Tropical palms, pirate ports, and beaches, beaches, beaches!

Just a short flight away, next-door neighbors to the east coast of North America are the Caribbean Islands--warm and sunny and very different from the mainland. The islands of the Caribbean, decorating a warm ocean year-round, are a favorite vacation spot.

In addition to the warm waves and sunshiny sandy beaches, they are also very different from the U.S. and Canada. People from many places joined the native people there, and languages spoken include English, Spanish, French, Dutch, Hindi (how did that happen?), and the native versions of Creole, local lingos with bits and pieces of other languages.

The Caribbean is a big place. From the northernmost of the Bahama Islands, just east of Florida, to the southern islands of Trinidad and Tobago, off the shores of South America, the Caribbean Sea covers a lot of territory.

It is about 1,500 miles across and 900 miles wide.

That's a lot of the briny deep that the pirates of the Caribbean roamed. And sail it they did, putting in to the many famous ports in the islands. Today most people stick to listening to steel drum music, wading with the flamingos, swimming, snorkeling, and skin diving to see the colorful coral reefs, angelfish and butterfly fish, and sea turtles.

The Caribbean Sea has three large islands--Cuba, Hispaniola (shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic) and Puerto Rico, part of the United States. The hundreds of other island are either self-ruled or colonies of other countries, which accounts for the varied languages and cultures on each island.

With short chapters on the Animals, Plants, and More About the Caribbean, with facts about history and government, Ginger McDonnell's Teacher Created Materials - TIME For Kids Informational Text: Next Stop: The Caribbean - Grade 2 - Guided Reading Level J is an an engaging introduction to nonfiction geography books, filled with color photos of toothy caimans, narrow city streets, local fruits and flowers, and of course those palm-filled beaches. It's a big world, and the Caribbean countries are a very different world not far from most of our own eastern coast, and this brief, vocabulary-controlled book allows primary readers to take their own a quick virtual trip to our next-door neighbors in this hemisphere. A map and glossary is included for the benefit of students working independently within the social studies curriculum.