Ballpark: The Story of America's Baseball Fields can be used for independent reading for grades second through sixth grade. It is directly correlated to interests of students. It goes through incredible amounts of history and correlates to baseball. This book can be used to teach key details, as there are many details about baseball it is essential to find the important details. This book can also be used to teach compare and contrast. There are many different ball parks and player mentioned that it can be used to start looking at similarities and differences of the players and the parks over time. This book can be good for all ages for independent read because it is interesting for a select few and is something they could keep coming back to.

This book is a great book for kids interested in sports and baseball. Many students are interested in sports and want to know the culture and history. This book does a great job explaining baseball fields and the culture behind it. The best ages would be for 2-4 grade. This would be a good book for a student to use for research and give information to students. This might not be a great read aloud because all students may not be interested and some students may not like it.

I think this book is really good at telling the history of the many aspects of baseball and I could definitely see upper elementary students, especially boys, enjoying this book. You could use this book to teach how different times in history affected the aspects of everyday life, from the perspective of baseball. You could also make inferences based on what happened to baseball at certain points in history to determine what the economy and everyday life was like at that time. You could also use part of this book to teach about civil rights, by reading the part of the book about Jackie Robinson. ( )

I liked this book mainly for the detail they put into explaining to the reader about baseball. Baseball is a complex sport and to tell about how soldiers were "playing at base at Valley Forge in 1823" is awesome to me. The authors use of writing allows the reader to get a grasp of baseball along with informing them about certain ball parks. The title confused me. It says ballparks and that's what I was expecting. However the book was good and I actually learned about the sport I have been playing for 17 years. I love how they relate baseball to being a huge part of American tradition. They talk about the use of the National Anthem and also all of the early presidents influences and attendance at the games. The plot wasn't as organized but went through baseball chronologically. They would go year by years or skip 50 years giving the reader important information about baseball. The language was good and used very descriptive words. They add in exclamation marks and use words like sizzled and slammed to add effect. The illustrations were pretty dull. They were basic pictures with not much line work. I feel as though it tried to put an old look on what baseball used to look but it was very unattractive to my eyes. I enjoyed this novel and the main reason was for students to get a brief history on the most popular sport in America.