Jake Drake: Know It All

By: Andrew Clements (2007)

This book is about a third grader named Jake Drake that is competing in a science fair where the grand prize is a fancy new computer that Jake really wants. Initially, Jake is very serious about winning solely because wants to win the new computer. As a result of this competitiveness, he finds that he is not having fun during the process and that he has even been somewhat mean to his best friend Willie. Jake decides to change his approach, teaming up with Willie and trying to have more fun with his project. Their team ends up getting second place, but they discover that it is more important to enjoy what you are doing and do it for the sake of scientific discovery.

I thought that this would be a good book for younger students that are just starting to read chapter books. There were occasional pages that had pictures on that that would help those younger students visualize what was happening in the story. The sentence structure in this book was very simple but I think it would be appropriate for students trying to become more confident in their reading ability. I did not think that the story was too predictable and I was pleased with the ending and the overall message that Jake and Willie learned.

As a teacher I think that this book had many positive aspects that would make it a choice that I would probably recommend to my students. I liked how the book mentioned the scientific method and its different steps and I think that younger students could relate to what Jake and Willie were going through during their experiment. I also liked how they eventually learned that it is more fun to be working on something that you are interested in and I think that this is a would be a good message for my students to take with them. I think that it might be fun for students in my class to perform some of the experiments mentioned in the book to see what the actual results would look like. This may also be a good opportunity for students to design their own experiments based on their interests, much like the characters in this book. The one thing that I did not like about this book was how Jake seemed to put down two "know it all's" in his class that he was competing with. The author seemed to make it seem like it is a bad thing to try hard in school and try to answer lots of questions. While some kids may see this as annoying, others may act like this and not see a problem with this, and as a teacher I would not want my students to think that it is not "cool" to try hard in school.