Welcome to the Family

Author: Mary Hoffman

Illustrator: Ros Asquith

Genre: Realistic Fiction

Grade Level: K-3

This book explores different ways a baby or child can come into a family. It talks about adoption as well as divorce and adding step siblings to the family. It talks about parents of the same gender and artificial insemination. It also talks about blending two families together who already have kids in each family. In the end it states how there will always be new children and asks the question "How did you come into YOUR family?"

This book can be used in the classroom to talk about where families come from and how important that they are. It can be used as a prompt for a writing to ponder on the differences in each family and why it is important to accept each others differences and be aware that it is normal to be different. 

The illustrations are very fun. They are colorful. They are set up in kind of a comic strip way with other comments happening within the pictures other than the text about the book above it. There is also a little bear that has small comments throughout the book about what they had just been talking about.