An intriguing approach to learning a foreign language but rough around the edges: possibly of greatest interest to students...
An instructional tool for learning South African Sign Language is built around a distant cousin of “The Great Big Enormous Turnip.”
Presented optionally in English or Afrikaans, the standard cumulative storyline is reduced to a set of wooden cartoon tableaux in which a farming family is introduced, does chores, pulls a gigantic carrot (which only takes three screens) and, with help from the livestock, chows down. The text is likewise simplified and stilted—“The farmer’s wife feeds the chickens. The rooster is on the roof. The hen and her chicks peck at the mielies”—with verbs printed in a different color and nouns highlighted. Tapping separate icons activates an audio reading and a signed rendition in a small video screen in the corner. The two are not synchronized but can be run at once. Tapping highlighted nouns will prompt an audio pronunciation and, on the side, an identifying picture, a video signing and a hand-spelled diagram. Though SASL is based on American Sign Language, it is not the same, which limits the usefulness of this app and its several series mates on this side of the Atlantic. Moreover, along with being dull, the English text has several typos: “The carrot is to big!!” and other blunders should be corrected in an update.
An intriguing approach to learning a foreign language but rough around the edges: possibly of greatest interest to students of sign languages. (Requires iOS 6 and above.) (iPad instructional/story app. 5-8)Pub Date: Feb. 16, 2014
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Picsterbooks
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2014
Continuing to find inspiration in the work of Virginia Lee Burton, Munro Leaf and other illustrators of the past, Long (The Little Engine That Could, 2005) offers an aw-shucks friendship tale that features a small but hardworking tractor (“putt puff puttedy chuff”) with a Little Toot–style face and a big-eared young descendant of Ferdinand the bull who gets stuck in deep, gooey mud. After the big new yellow tractor, crowds of overalls-clad locals and a red fire engine all fail to pull her out, the little tractor (who had been left behind the barn to rust after the arrival of the new tractor) comes putt-puff-puttedy-chuff-ing down the hill to entice his terrified bovine buddy successfully back to dry ground. Short on internal logic but long on creamy scenes of calf and tractor either gamboling energetically with a gaggle of McCloskey-like geese through neutral-toned fields or resting peacefully in the shade of a gnarled tree (apple, not cork), the episode will certainly draw nostalgic adults. Considering the author’s track record and influences, it may find a welcome from younger audiences too. (Picture book. 5-8)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-399-25248-8
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Philomel
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2009
SEEN & HEARD
One of the watershed moments in African-American history—the defeat of James Braddock at the hands of Joe Louis—is here given an earnest picture-book treatment. Despite his lack of athletic ability, Sammy wants desperately to be a great boxer, like his hero, getting boxing lessons from his friend Ernie in exchange for help with schoolwork. However hard he tries, though, Sammy just can’t box, and his father comforts him, reminding him that he doesn’t need to box: Joe Louis has shown him that he “can be the champion at anything [he] want[s].” The high point of this offering is the big fight itself, everyone crowded around the radio in Mister Jake’s general store, the imagined fight scenes played out in soft-edged sepia frames. The main story, however, is so bent on providing Sammy and the reader with object lessons that all subtlety is lost, as Mister Jake, Sammy’s father, and even Ernie hammer home the message. Both text and oil-on-canvas-paper illustrations go for the obvious angle, making the effort as a whole worthy, but just a little too heavy-handed. (Picture book. 5-8)
Pub Date: May 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-58430-161-9
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Lee & Low Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2004
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