The word "parent" is not just a noun. It's also a verb.
This book follows an inquisitive, precocious little Black boy as he battles boredom and a rainy day with his imaginative pretend play. It starts, of course, with a cardboard box, and rolls on from there – dishrags, socks, goggles, swimming trunks – nothing is spared on this little boy’s quest to launch his rocket ship, all through the day right into B-E-D!
This book rings all the bells: an engaging story, a hands on activity, bold illustrations. Get ready to read this one again and again.
The illustrations are dark (it is nighttime after-all) and vivid. They practically jump off the page in bold colors. The dialogue is streamlined and engaging. A solid bedtime story.
In this engaging book, filled with artful, amusing, alliteration, Genhart weaves a tale of inclusion and exclusion using different birds to bring out assumptions about a group that is new to the neighborhood. Each bird type, begging to be read in a different voice/accent (you and the kid will have more fun that way), finds a different reason to exclude, fear, mistrust the flamboyance.
This is a sweet, fun book that can help reinforce one of the earliest phonological skills: rhyming. Using a book with characters children love and being able to talk about words that rhyme is a win-win for everyone.
Gloria makes yummy porridge and refuses to give any to her cat. Her cat, of course, ends up eating all of it. When Gloria finds out, she chases the cat with a spoon. The cat, jumps on a donkey. The donkey starts a ruckus, disturbing a tree that unsettles some bees . . . .
And so on . . . .
“But where is the prince,” my son asked at the end of the story. “There isn’t one,” we answered. And so began the discussion at the end of Woolvin’s Rapunzel, an empowering take on the traditional damsel in distress story we’ve all heard (and told) over the years. In this Rapunzel, Rapunzel doesn’t need saving. She figures everything out, all on her own.
While the soft and lyrical writing in this book is sparse, the illustrations really fill out the details. Our protagonist gets glimpses of her neighbors through lit windows. Vignettes of life that are otherwise hidden.
I generally recommend Flap Books solely for the 4 and under set. The Peek-A-Boo crowd has a tendency to skew young and holding a kid’s interest gets harder as they get older. Once the quaintness of lifting paper to reveal something underneath is gone, a story has to be pretty good to keep a youngin’s attention–and those stories, at least in this type of book, are rare. Perrin, however, manages to merge a delightfully engaging narrative and wonderfully detailed illustrations into some basic and intricate folds that elevate this Flap Book to another level.