Perhaps not inspired, but durable and instructive.
A sturdy and serviceable collection of rhymes and songs for toddlers.
Nursery rhymes, with their regular meter and repetitive sounds, are useful tools that expand toddlers’ vocabularies and, eventually, help them begin to match up memorized lines with printed words on the page. This introductory volume of verses includes a mix of old standards—“Humpty Dumpty,” “Jack and Jill,” and “This Little Piggy,” for example—alongside such popular children’s songs as “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” “Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes,” and “The Wheels on the Bus.” “One, Two, Buckle My Shoe” is on hand to teach children to count from one to 10. The artwork is simple and easily grasped by young readers; it is, therefore, also somewhat plain and lacking in detail. Rather than presenting each rhyme with distinct characters and scenarios, the book is peopled with friendly-looking animals who appear and reappear throughout its pages. This is not to say that the drawings lack personality. Humpty Dumpty manages to smile despite his freshly cracked skull, for example, and a turtle nurse slowly rushes to bandage Jack’s broken crown as Jill tumbles downhill, water spilling in all directions. Little Bo Peep’s sheep peer out from preposterously ineffective hiding places. The thick cover is ideal for little hands to grip, and the stiff cardboard pages should be tough to damage.
Perhaps not inspired, but durable and instructive. (Board book. 1-5)Pub Date: March 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-68010-536-0
Page Count: 24
Publisher: Tiger Tales
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
Leave the hopping to Peter Cottontail and sing the original song instead.
An Easter-themed board-book parody of the traditional nursery rhyme.
Unfortunately, this effort is just as sugary and uninspired as The Itsy Bitsy Snowman, offered by the same pair in 2015. A cheerful white bunny hops through a pastel world to distribute candy and treats for Easter but spills his baskets. A hedgehog, fox, mouse, and various birds come to the bunny’s rescue, retrieving the candy, helping to devise a distribution plan, and hiding the eggs. Then magically, they all fly off in a hot air balloon as the little animals in the village emerge to find the treats. Without any apparent purpose, the type changes color to highlight some words. For very young children every word is new, so highlighting “tiny tail” or “friends” makes no sense. Although the text is meant to be sung, the words don't quite fit the rhythm of the original song. Moreover, there are not clear motions to accompany the text; without the fingerplay movements, this book has none of the satisfying verve of the traditional version.
Leave the hopping to Peter Cottontail and sing the original song instead. (Board book. 1-3)Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4814-5621-0
Page Count: 16
Publisher: Little Simon/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An acceptable and sturdy addition to the Easter basket for baby bunnies deemed too young to handle Dorothy Kunhardt's more...
Following on the successful Five Little Pumpkins (2003), Yaccarino teams with Rabe for bunnies.
The five pastel bunnies are cute enough, and the rhymes are accurate, if somewhat wordy for toddlers. But without a clear one-to-one relationship between the words and the pictures, it is not always clear which bunny is speaking and what is being counted. The bunnies, identified as first, second, and so on, hop around the pages instead of staying in a consistent order as the rhyme implies. Naming them by color might have been a better choice, but that would mean abandoning the finger-play counting-rhyme formula. The children who show up to hunt the eggs are a multicultural cast of cartoonish figures with those in the background drawn as blue and green silhouettes. Though the text on the back cover invites children to count the eggs, there is no hint as to how many eggs they should find. Neither the verse nor the pictures provide counting assistance. The youngest children will not care about any of this; they will be content to point out the different colors of the bunnies and the patterns on the eggs.
An acceptable and sturdy addition to the Easter basket for baby bunnies deemed too young to handle Dorothy Kunhardt's more satisfying but fragile classic, Pat the Bunny. (Board book. 1-3)Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-225339-2
Page Count: 16
Publisher: HarperFestival
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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