By Lisa Cohn

If you’ve got book lovers, teaching them how to review books has numerous advantages: They learn communications and public-speaking skills, for starters.

What’s more, book reviews can give kids an outlet for communicating their emotions about any topic that’s important to them.

For example, Michael, age 5, loves Scooby-Doo books. He’s brimming with happiness and enthusiasm as he talks to this group of first graders about two Scooby-Doo books:

Whether kids love Scooby-Doo or dogs in general, they can review a dog book and include their feelings, thoughts and opinions about their favorite Fido. Or they can review a train book and share their love of trains.

And that’s not all. Teaching kids to do book reviews prepares them for any activity that requires expressing an opinion or providing feedback and commentary.

It’s not always easy for children to communicate their opinions. Often, it comes out as “I love it!” or “I hate it!” Teaching them a review process helps them think about their opinions and express them in ways that are helpful to others.

When reviewing a book, kids should begin by saying something positive, and provide details about why they like a book. If their overall feeling is negative, by all means they can start with that feeling—depending on who they’re talking to. If they’re reviewing a friend’s work, it’s a good idea to begin by saying something positive, and then politely providing some constructive criticism.

This might sound something like, “I really like the funny parts of your book, but I think you should consider changing the last line. I don’t understand it.”

Just as important, a good book review brims with enthusiasm, feeling, and detail, like Michael’s discussion in the video above.

Learning a review process will help kids in other areas of their lives. It should help them find ways to give constructive criticism to friends and family members.

Imagine this: Instead of kids telling you, “I hate the way you make those cookies” they might learn to say, “I like the way you included chocolate chips, but next time maybe you could try to avoid burning them.”

That’s a lot of benefits to kids for learning to review books!

Learn more about our kids’ book reviews and our own children’s book, “Bash and Lucy Fetch Confidence,” by visiting BashAndLucy.com