What Can We Play Today?

Magic Castle Readers

by Jane Belk Moncure

Offers the reader the opportunity to guess which occupations correspond to a variety of uniforms and profiles each occupation.

Genres: Childrens, Picture Books

31 pages, Library Binding

First published January 1, 1987

About the author

Jane Belk Moncure (born December 1926) is an American author of early childhood non-fiction, fiction and poetry. She has also written under the names Bruce Wannamaker and Jennie Davis.

Moncure has lived in Virginia and North Carolina. She worked in early childhood education for thirty-five years. She lives in Elon College, North Carolina.

Moncure is a creative and prolific author: there are millions of her books in circulation, and they are widely distributed in schools and libraries. Distribution has been primarily through The ChildsWorld, ChildrensPress and Scholastic. Her creations and works include My First Steps to Reading, My First Steps to Math, My First Steps to Science, Word Bird, The Soundbox Books, and The Magic Castle Series. Her works have been translated into British English, Spanish, French, Chinese, and Malay. Belk Library, Elon University holds a collection of all published books by Moncure.

Jane Belk Moncure is a recipient of the C.S. Lewis Award and over the past 20 years, her works were recognized by numerous Awards. Most recently, in 2008, Jane received the Scholastic Teacher's Choice Award for her outstanding contribution to the My First Steps to Learning Program. --from Wikipedia

Reviews

[Kelly Chester · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a great book very educational

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm biased because the child opening the "word window" in this story has my name :) Besides that though it is a wonderful illustration of so many things we can dress up or pretend to be. A great variety of professions and clear explanations of what each one does at work. It is also interactive because each page you get a picture clue and the question "can you guess what we'll be today?" followed by the answer and explanation.

[Lauri Quist · Rating 4 out of 5]

What Can We Play Today? is a Magic Castle Book. "A library is a magic castle with many word windows." A word window is a book. This word window is all about dressing up as community helpers. It shows how each helper dresses and what they do in the community. Firefighters, mail carriers and fix-it people are among some of the characters in this book. This book's kid friendly illustrations and easy to read words will make it a favorite of young readers.

[Theresa · Rating 3 out of 5]

What Can We Play Today?
Moncure, Jane Belk
a great early primer teaching about jobs

[Melissa Sommer · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a book about dress-up. I thought this was a good book to read to a group of kids because it kept there attention and let them use their imagination.

[Kymberly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book how teaching children about community helpers. As there is different types of each category of community helpers. Showing that each job-person is needed and appreciated.

[Natalie Lopez]

This book is in Spanish because I am doing dual language immersion in Spanish. This book is also related to my gender roles topic. It is about a boy and a girl who play dress-up together. They dress up as firefighters, police officers, post office employees, and in construction. Both the boy and the girl play the same role so it gives children the idea that they can both have the same professions when they get older. The genre is realistic fiction because boys and girls play dress-up together all the time and it is also informational because it explains the jobs of each of the professions. There is one thing I do not like about this book. One of the professions they dress up as is doctor and nurse. Of course, the boy is dressed as the doctor and the girl is the nurse just like in the majority of the books out there. What I plan to do is to discretely tape the pages together to skip over these couple of pages to not keep engraving that idea in children’s head. This is one thing that as future teachers we will have to learn how to deal with. We will have to find creative ways to avoid such things.