Readers looking to strengthen their elementary Spanish or English vocabulary will appreciate this collection.
Inspired by a camping trip to California’s Yuba River, mother-daughter duo Ada and Zubizarreta-Ada team up for a bilingual picture-book collection of poetry covering the ABCs of nature.
A collection of 29 poems—each one standing for a letter in the Spanish alphabet—takes readers on a nature-filled journey punctuated by glimpses of butterflies, hummingbirds, frogs, the Milky Way, pebbles, and more. For every Spanish poem there is a corresponding English translation. While the English alphabet consists of a solid 26 letters, Spanish has a few more, and through clever strategies, the co-authors incorporate most of them. For instance, “Niña de la trusa azul” is the vehicle for the letter “ñ” while the italicized English word in “Ventana o window” stands for the letter “w.” Like “ñ,” “rr” occurs in the middle of words; however, it does not get a poem. Every letter brings readers to a setting along the Yuba: evening campfires, cicadas chirping, toes dipped in water, a boulder island, forest, and sunsets. In Spanish, the poetry carries a lovely, lyrical, smooth, fluid, and rhythmic cadence; and on occasion the English pacing does not measure up. Utomo’s watercolors lend a dreamy quality to the warm browns and greens; readers will feel the sun’s warmth and hear the rippling waters.
Readers looking to strengthen their elementary Spanish or English vocabulary will appreciate this collection. (Picture book/poetry. 5-8 )Pub Date: May 31, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-55885-899-2
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Piñata Books/Arte Público
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
A gleeful game for budding naturalists.
Artfully cropped animal portraits challenge viewers to guess which end they’re seeing.
In what will be a crowd-pleasing and inevitably raucous guessing game, a series of close-up stock photos invite children to call out one of the titular alternatives. A page turn reveals answers and basic facts about each creature backed up by more of the latter in a closing map and table. Some of the posers, like the tail of an okapi or the nose on a proboscis monkey, are easy enough to guess—but the moist nose on a star-nosed mole really does look like an anus, and the false “eyes” on the hind ends of a Cuyaba dwarf frog and a Promethea moth caterpillar will fool many. Better yet, Lavelle saves a kicker for the finale with a glimpse of a small parasitical pearlfish peeking out of a sea cucumber’s rear so that the answer is actually face and butt. “Animal identification can be tricky!” she concludes, noting that many of the features here function as defenses against attack: “In the animal world, sometimes your butt will save your face and your face just might save your butt!” (This book was reviewed digitally.)
A gleeful game for budding naturalists. (author’s note) (Informational picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: July 11, 2023
ISBN: 9781728271170
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Sourcebooks eXplore
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Enticing and eco-friendly.
Why and how to make a rain garden.
Having watched through their classroom window as a “rooftop-rushing, gutter-gushing” downpour sloppily flooded their streets and playground, several racially diverse young children follow their tan-skinned teacher outside to lay out a shallow drainage ditch beneath their school’s downspout, which leads to a patch of ground, where they plant flowers (“native ones with tough, thick roots,” Schaub specifies) to absorb the “mucky runoff” and, in time, draw butterflies and other wildlife. The author follows up her lilting rhyme with more detailed explanations of a rain garden’s function and construction, including a chart to help determine how deep to make the rain garden and a properly cautionary note about locating a site’s buried utility lines before starting to dig; she concludes with a set of leads to online information sources. Gómez goes more for visual appeal than realism. In her scenes, a group of smiling, round-headed, very small children in rain gear industriously lay large stones along a winding border with little apparent effort; nevertheless, her images of the little ones planting generic flowers that are tall and lush just a page turn later do make the outdoorsy project look like fun.
Enticing and eco-friendly. (Picture book. 5-7)Pub Date: March 12, 2024
ISBN: 9781324052357
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Norton Young Readers
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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