Quibbles aside, this volume should broaden children’s verbal skills while providing opportunities for conversation and...
Familiar sights of several common childhood excursions.
What this sturdy board book lacks in narrative it makes up in vocabulary. Sixteen double-page set pieces depict early childhood forays out of the home and a sampling of what might be found at each destination. Featured hotspots include preschool, the doctor’s office, the library, the train station, the farm, the beach, the museum, and more. Photographs of everyday objects make this book ideal for “point-and-say” interplay. Featured objects mostly hit the mark: puppet, crayons, and modeling clay at preschool, for example, and piglets, pony, and rabbit at the farm. The doctor’s office presents a few conceptual challenges, though. It features both “adhesive bandages” and, well, “bandages” (i.e., gauze bandages), a distinction that may be lost on some children. While kids will readily identify stethoscopes, “otoscope” seems a bit more obscure despite the frequency of ear exams by the doctor. The spreads on the library, train station, aquarium, and playground don’t feature highlighted vocabulary; perhaps “book,” “train,” “fish,” and “slide” seemed too obvious. Animal rights advocates may disapprove of the zoo and aquarium scenes, but the animal photographs should delight young readers. The toy-store scene, replete with trains, dinosaurs, dolls, and blocks, will build young vocabularies and, perhaps, pint-sized consumers, as well.
Quibbles aside, this volume should broaden children’s verbal skills while providing opportunities for conversation and instruction. (Board book. 1-4)Pub Date: June 13, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4654-6083-7
Page Count: 36
Publisher: DK Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
Don’t judge this book by its cover; there’s an unusual concept and whimsical illustrations hiding underneath
A series of solid shapes substitute for natural objects in this board book that is somewhere between concept book and riddle game.
What’s that shape supposed to be? Running across a rust-brown labeled triangle, amid trees and elk, the text “Climb a TRIANGLE to the top” suggests the shape is a mountain; in an ocean scene with a red “STAR washed in on the waves,” the shape implies a sea star. Ample visual cues give young readers enough context to guess what the shape evokes, with some unexpected touches, such as “HEXAGON” printed on hexagonal honeycombs buzzing with bees and surrounded by golden flowers. Short, commanding sentences keep things humming, but with only six shapes covered, the book feels all too brief. Illustrator Devernay combines delicate pencil line drawings and sketchy gray-black shading with tiny, meticulously cut colored-paper collage to create her plants and animals. The most intimate drawings amaze. Close-ups of smooth stones are so appealing that readers will long to pick one up and “rub a smooth OVAL between thumb and finger.” Sadly, the cover doesn’t do the interior justice, and things get murky when several hues mix there and on the final spread. But on other spreads, where there’s a single color, it pops against the gray, such as the minute yellow beaks on the flock of charcoal birds circling the yellow “CIRCLE” sun.
Don’t judge this book by its cover; there’s an unusual concept and whimsical illustrations hiding underneath . (Board book. 1-3)Pub Date: March 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-56846-317-9
Page Count: 14
Publisher: Creative Editions/Creative Company
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
BLOG
Satisfying, engaging, and sure to entertain the toddlers at whom it is aimed.
Nine basic shapes in vivid shifting colors are stacked on pages in various permutations.
This visually striking and carefully assembled collection of shapes, which seems to have been inspired by an Eric Carle aesthetic, invites young children to put their observation, categorization, problem-solving, color, and spatial-relation skills to work, pondering shapes and compositions—and even learning about prepositions in the process. As the text says, “a stack of shapes can make you think and wonder what you see.” First, readers see a circle under a strawberry (the red diamond with a leafy, green top and yellow-triangle seeds) and then that berry over a green square. The orange oval made to look like a fish is added to a stack of three shapes to become “yellow over diamond under guppy over green.” And so on. The metamorphosis of many of these simple shapes into animals (a yellow circle becomes a lion; a green square, a frog; a pink heart, a pig; a yellow diamond, a chicken) will surprise and delight children. Questions are directed at readers: Is a square with two round eyes and semicircle feet a “frog or square or green?” Why, all of the above! The text possesses a pleasing rhythm and subtle rhymes, positively begging to be read aloud: “circle next to berry / square by bear by sweet // blue up high / pig down low / yellow in between.” (This book was reviewed digitally.)
Satisfying, engaging, and sure to entertain the toddlers at whom it is aimed. (Picture book. 2-4)Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-79720-508-3
Page Count: 52
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2021
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