Pioneers of Light and Sound

Pioneers of Light and Sound is an expository nonfiction text about scientists who studied light and sound such as Thomas Young, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, George Eastman, Thomas Edison, Oberlin Smith, and Alexander Graham Bell. The text includes a section on chemical engineer Jan Talbot. Readers gain interesting information from text and graphics. Multiple scientists and their work are highlighted in the text. A two-page experiment written in third person procedural language invites students to make a periscope.

Pioneers of Light and Sound is divided into sections. A range of illustrations are used which add information and support the reader’s interpretation of the text, including labeled photos and diagrams. Many fact boxes and sidebars are used to provide students with additional learning opportunities. Periods, commas, exclamation marks, quotation marks, and question marks are used. A table of contents, a glossary, and an index support the reader.

Sentences structures and lengths vary with a wide variety of parts of speech. Base words with affixes, possessives, and a full range of plurals and compound words are used. Sentences contain connectives, contractions, prepositional phrases, and verbs with inflection endings. The text occasionally uses parentheses embedded in sentences. Glossary words are bold faced throughout the text. Some words appear in the vocabulary of mature language users.

This title is from the Science Readers series from Teacher Created Materials. Build literacy skills and science content knowledge with high-interest, appropriately levelled information texts.