Hiking by Valerie Bodden is an informative text on hiking that is perfect for young readers. With stunning full color pictures, large font, and a glossary this book is a perfect introduction to hiking. This book is a great length for a read aloud and the language and structure are simple enough that many 2nd and 3rd grade readers could peruse it independently or in small groups.Every page contains a paragraph addressing a specific topic (boots, trails, safety) and a large photograph to illustrate it. The photographs all show hikers in action and have captions which gives additional information either on the page's topic or elaborating on the picture.
In the back of the book there is also a brief glossary which explains a few of the terms; however, it is not very good. It chooses to highlight words like "grooves" and "mountain", but some of the more specific hiking vocabulary mentioned in the book such as "compass", "topographic map", and "backpacker" are inexplicably left out; moreover, the glossary lacks a pronunciation guide. Again, within the text, words like "topographic" are broken down phonetically, but in the glossary this concept is not addressed. It seems that if a words meaning was addressed in the text, then it was not included in the glossary. Again, this is not the best way to introduce readers to how glossaries are truly used.
Underneath the four word glossary is an index, which does a much better job. Essentially it guides the reader to the words it left out of the glossary. It also guides the reader to other topics found in the book. Since the book is written in a more narrative format than most non-fiction books it lacks a table of contents.
This book can be a great introduction to young readers about hiking and may be beneficial for talking about the structure of non-fiction texts. If we used this book focusing on non-fiction structure, however, there would probably be a lot of gaps that would need to be supplemented with plenty of other non-fiction texts.
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