Gyo Fujikawa's A to Z Picture Book

Gyo Fujikawa's A to Z Picture Book is amazing and gorgeous. When I picked it up in the bookstore and flipped through it, I was just in awe. I expected to find a $25 price tag on the back, but lo and behold, it costs $9.95. I could not believe it! This is a steal, and it is totally worth buying in hardback and new at that price. (The book is recently back in print after the 1970s version went out of print, and I don't know how the original compares.)

I only bought this book about six months ago, but I imagine that it would be a great one for infants and toddlers. It doubles as a vocabulary book, with numerous labeled illustrations of individual things on each letter's page. A young child would be interested in the book for language learning years before the alphabet has any meaning.

The downside to this approach to the alphabet is that there is no "story" or rhyme to read through, and there is a lot to look at on each page. Charlie enjoys looking at it for a little bit, but we will just do a page or two before he loses interest. That's fine with me, but I just have to make sure to start at a different page each time.

Legible Capital and Lowercase: A. The capital letter is shown in a very large font at the top left of each page, and the lowercase at the bottom right (a few pages mix it up and use top-right/bottom-left). The illustrations do interact with the letters, which has the potential to be a little bit confusing, but I don't find that they detract from the legibility.

Filler Words: A. A few comments about the format of this book are necessary at this point. Most letters get a full two-page black and white spread, with the large capital and lowercase and a bunch of things that start with that letter illustrated and labeled. Some of the less popular letters share a two-page spread, for example E on the left page and F on the right. Interspersed with these are two-page color spreads, but when two letters share a black and white page, only one of those letters gets a color page (E, G, I, K, O, Q, U, V, X, and Z do not have color pages). All of the black and white pages use the same format, but the color pages vary widely. A is contemplative: "A is for alone, / all by myself . . . / Hi, there, frog! / Can I play with you?" The illustration shows mostly sky and empty swamp, with just a lone girl standing, looking at frog on a rock. B is an entirely different experience: "B is for busy babies!" is the sole text, and the illustration shows literally dozens of babies and toddlers engaged in all manner of activities, interspersed with animals--and there are no labels. An infant or young toddler could spend easily 20 minutes with a parent pointing out all the things and activities on this page.

So, the black and white pages have little opportunity for filler words, since they are just labeled illustrations. Even so, there are some. One picture on the C page is labeled "Clara is crawling;" another is "Cat and copycat." The color pages do use filler words, but they are so carefully chosen and poetic (not in a rhyming way, but in an evocative way) that I have trouble thinking of them as "filler." Other color pages have hardly any words, or are highly alliterative ("F is for friends, fairies, flowers, fish, and frogs.")

Cheat Words: A-. In general, the author was extremely creative in coming up with words for unusual letters (zinnia, zero, zombie, zipper, zebra, and zoom!). She does sometimes use different starting sounds for a letter, but all of them very normal alternate sounds (under vs. unicorn). I'm not a fan of the X page, however (x-ray, X marks the spot, XXXXXX is for kisses, X is for railroad crossing, xeranthemum, xylophone).

Understandable Words: A. Okay, some of them are weird (didn't I just mention xeranthemum?), but they are all understandable. The xeranthemum is clearly illustrated and labeled, and even though I'd never heard the word before, I'm quite certain now that it's that kind of flower pictured right there. Unusual flower, bird, and animal names make lots of appearances, but I think that's fine because they are very concrete. A lot of abstract words are mixed in, but they are ones that a child can easily grasp, like "pout" and "hungry" and "crybaby."

Sounding Out: B. There are plenty of good sounding-out words here (eggs, fox, fish, lark, milk), but the font is pretty small for a little kid and it would be hard to focus that well. These words are mixed in with a lot that are not phonetic.

Hidden Pictures: (none). There is plenty of detail to notice in many of the color spreads, but there is no particular emphasis on including things that start with the same letter.

Illustrations: A. I did not recognize the name Gyo Fujikawa, but apparently she was a celebrated children's author and illustrator from the late 1950s through 1990. You will immediately recognize the illustration style when you pick up the book. My immediate thought was that this looked like a sappy-sweet 1950s gender-stereotypical morality-play type of illustration. But as soon as you start looking at what is actually there, you will discover amazing talent and depth in the illustrations. Faces are expressive in innumerable ways. Contrasts in subject matter leap off the page. Composition is just gorgeous. Reality and fantasy are equally well portrayed. It's a gem.

Theme (none).

You should buy this one. It's a bargain at twice the price.

Blue Hat, Green Hat

There's not too much I can say about Blue Hat, Green Hat. We have enjoyed many of the Sandra Boynton board books since Charlie was a little baby, but they're just so simple that there's not much to say. Don't let the simplicity fool you, though. Boynton's books are excellent for babies and very young toddlers.

I chose Blue Hat, Green Hat to review today because it's enjoying a resurgence of popularity in the eyes of two-and-a-half-year-old Charlie. The story is extremely simple: A series of animals get dressed, one piece of clothing at a time, but the turkey always manages to put his clothes on wrong. Hat on his feet, socks on his hands, coat on backwards, that kind of thing. The only words are the color and name of each item of clothing, and then the word "oops" under the turkey each time. It's up to the parent and child to point out and explain what went wrong for the turkey.

This is a great book for learning colors and the names of items of clothing, but Charlie has those down like the back of his hand at this point. The reason he's interested in it again is that he can dress himself now and he just loves pointing out the turkey's mistakes and explaining what he should have done instead. Additionally, the words are so simple that Charlie can "read" the entire book himself. That is, there are no words other than what he can easily observe from the pictures and say out loud.  No parental involvement necessary! (Though he still likes to read it together with me.) I'm glad to see that this book has a bit of staying power past the infant stage.

My Little Word Book

Our copy of My Little Word Book is tattered and held together with clear packing tape, despite being a board book. This is because Charlie slept with it in his bed from when he was about 9 months to when he was about 18 months, and we read it every night (not to mention in the daytime as well). It's your standard word book, with a photograph of something and its name written below, but extremely well done.

Montessori prefers the one-item-on-a-page style of word book, but that format is limiting for the simple reason that you can only have a certain number of items before you run out of pages. This book has between five and twelve items on each page. Most pages separate each item into its own box (as shown on the cover), but a few pages (flowers, vegetables, actions) are in a more freeflowing, overlapping format). Even on the item-in-a-box pages, at least one item takes up two or more squares. So, for example, on the toys page, the doll is two squares tall and the train is two squares long. This adds some visual interest and makes the book a bit more fun to look through.

What I really love about this book is how each two-page spread shows a category of items. First is body parts and people (boy, girl, man, woman).Next is actions (walk, sing, dance, kick). Next is clothing, then household items (clock, sofa, cup, computer). Next come toys, then food, then flowers and other outdoor items (tree, fence, frog). There's a vehicles page, then farm animals, then pets and birds, then wild animals (from squirrel to camel to tiger). The page labeled "our world" combines pictures of the sun and moon, a street scene, and a park on one page, with things like jungle, farmland, and beach on the opposite page. The last page is colors and shapes.

Charlie would go through phases where he was interested in particular pages/categories and ignored others. It was fascinating for me to watch him enthralled by the parts of the body one month, then skipping that page and heading right to vehicles day after day the next month. It allowed me to easily figure out what his little brain was focusing on, and then to enhance that focus by talking about it and bringing out other books on the same subject while he was most interested.

During his animal phase, Charlie also very much enjoyed My Little Animal Book, in the same series. It's the same size, shape, and style as the Word book, but obviously, focusing entirely on animals. The animals are categorized on pages for different types: farm, pets, African, jungle, ocean, forests, polar, rivers and lakes, reptiles and amphibians, bugs, birds, and Australian. The last three pages offer interactive activities that are not found in the Word book: match moms to babies, match patterns to animals, and counting.

Both of these books get my absolute highest recommendation for the under-18-months crowd.