The two books being assessed are both for the North Carolina 4th Grade class and were submitted in 1997 on behalf of the North Carolina State University for Adoption.  The overall structure is very similar, both text contain a Table of Contents, Glossary, and Index but text A doesn’t contain an appendix and text B does.  Text A contains an almanac with facts about counties, governors, and other famous people related to North Carolina History.  Text A and B have a strong overall organization and structure.
     These books contain a wealth of information that is essential about North Carolina.  In both texts the information is organized by both chronological, and topical order. Text A seemed to be less current and mentioned current events less than B.
 In each chapter the Title of the Chapter gives and introductory states about the main idea of the section and then the sections are broken down into relating subtopics.  Neither of the text really requires the students to recall prior knowledge from the reading except for bold-faced vocabulary words, which are repeated throughout the chapter.  Text A had a weaker development of ideas in paragraphs then B; but neither text have summary or conclusion paragraphs for the sections or chapters.  At the end of each section review questions are given to further probe thinking and are not just to recall facts.  At the end of the each chapter are question for both probing thinking and recalling facts.  Text B has the weakest question for generating personal ideas about the information.
      The sentence structure in both of the text is short and simple, but most of the verbs are in a passive voice and there is little use of sequence words.  Text A used more explicit words for comparisons and signals for illustrations than B.  Text A contains more vocabulary words that the students might not know.  When Assessing the readability text A actually scored in the 6th grade reading level and B was in the College level reading.  I assessed the readability of both the texts twice and got the same results each time.
     Both the texts have good colorful illustrations and visual aids meshed in with the text but B had more references to specific illustrations that are appropriately labeled than A.  Overall, I feel that both of the books will be beneficial to the classroom and each have their own strengths and weaknesses.  If I were a teacher deciding which of the books for my students I would choose text A because it contained stronger sentence structure and development of ideas, and the questions were geared to generate a students own ideas about the topic.