A SCALE FULL OF FISH

Ten sets of terms turned around--with rich woodcuts, reminiscent of Frasconi, that almost compensate for the slightness of the content. The titular ""scale full of fish"" becomes, on the opposite page, ""a fish full of scales""; ""planing a board"" turns into ""boarding a plane""--as you might have guessed but a child can't be expected to. Primarily, of course, this is a play on homonyms; some inversions, however, represent a shift only in grammatical position (""A tree in a house""/ ""A house in a tree"") and these, being less capricious, are more suggestive. But the book, not unlike Frasconi's See and Say, is more likely to be admired by adults than utilized by children--though a creative teacher could use its display of woodcut techniques (supplemented by a note on woodblock printing) as a model for a classroom exercise in illustrating the multiple meanings of words.