Pastel collage scenes of small animals at work and play offer the Oshkosh set opportunities aplenty to interpret and respond to visual busyness.
The activities are captioned by a mix of descriptive comments and leading questions (“They can’t wait to eat their breakfast. Have you noticed that they all like to eat different things?”) and supplemented by strips of labeled details to spot. The story, such it is, describes a commune of 10 anthropomorphized animals who rise together and then go on to eat, play, visit a grocery store and a farm, and at last get ready for bed. Billet dresses her stylized, bright-eyed puppy, sheep, koala and other nursery schooler stand-ins in human clothing, places them against pale, flattened natural or urban backdrops, and surrounds them with easily identifiable tools, toys, foodstuffs, wildlife and other figures. Nine selected items parade across each spread’s bottom with a “Can you see…?” challenge and one-word (mostly) identifiers.
Sugary, but just the ticket for tykes not yet up to more teeming I Spy–style panoramas. (Picture book. 2-4)
