House and Home: Homes Around the World by Dona Herweck Rice

What kind of home do you like?

While those brightly painted Renaissance townhouses on a Venetian canal look pretty good, there are plenty of other dwellings for all climes from all over the world in store.

There's a rustic cottage on a lake, small but with a view. Or if you really want to stay on the move, there's a well-appointed motorhome to see the sights as you drive and say goodnight whenever you choose to park.

There's a homey white frame suburban rancher with matching white fence or a brownstone apartment with fire escapes for each. There's a stationary mobile home in town or a movable yurt out on the steppes. There is a modern apartment house with balconies, an old pueblo apartment (with ladders) or individual houses made of sun-dried clay, Or for a very short commute to work, there is a farmhouse with adjoining barn, painted, well, barn red,

There are brightly decorated roundhouses, or simple thatched-roof roundhouses, or small round huts made of bundles of reeds for each family. There is also a medieval castle with drawbridge, comfy and picturesque if you have plenty of retainers to do the housekeeping. (Warning: Cinderellas are hard to retain if there is a prince nearby.)

There are many types of homes in Dona Herweck Rice's emergent reader book, Homes Around the World(Time for Kids), rounded out with easy-to-read descriptions and home habitata, and with a Picture Glossary and Words to Know appended, making this one both an easy reader and a basic social studies source. Color photos show a wide variety of human habitats and the different sorts of houses people build for them. Pair this one with Rice's nonfiction companion book, Teacher Created Materials - TIME For Kids Informational Text: Kids Around the World - Grade 1 - Guided Reading Level I.