The Teddy Bear ABC (DK Publishing)

So many good books are out of print. I picked up The Teddy Bear ABC at a garage sale, and fortunately there are dozens of copies available on Amazon for very cheap. Finally, here is an alphabet book that Charlie and I can agree on. We both love it!

The gimmick with this book is that every letter has a different teddy bear with a name starting with that letter. This is kind of neat because the bears are cute, and because it introduces names as well as ordinary words that start with the letter. Of course, a lot of alphabet books do that just by using sentences, but this is another way to do it. Weirdly, there are two pages that combine letters and only give bear names, with no other words, for those letters. "I is for Ivan, J is for Jerry, K is for koala, kangaroo, and Kerry," and "X is for Xavier, Y is for Yo, Z is for zipper, Zack, and zero."

Legible Capital and Lowercase: A. The capital and lowercase letters are at the top left of each page, in a large, clear font, in bright colors. Very easy to see and recognize.

Filler Words: A. This book doesn't present sentences, it just gives three items starting with each letter and puts them in a sentence of the form, "A is for apple, ants, and Adelle, B is for Bruno, butterfly, and bell." The last words given for the two letters in the spread always rhyme, which is a nice touch and makes the text flow very well. The down side of this presentation method is that all of the words are nouns and names, with no other parts of speech mixed in.

Cheat Words: A-. Most of the words are fine, but they do inexplicably use Phil as a P name. They skip out on words for X and only present the name Xavier, which doesn't use the standard X sound.. Everything else is fine.

Understandable Words: A+. All of the words in this book are understandable, relevant to kids, easily illustrated, and actually illustrated. The sentences run across the tops of the pages. The bottom 2/3 of each page has photographs of the items, each labeled with its name.

Sounding Out: B. Some words are puzzlers (crumb, feather, Hugh), but there is at least one word that can be sounded out on each page.

Hidden Pictures: B. At the top of each page, there is a drawing of a cartoon teddy bear. On almost every page, the bear is doing or holding one thing that starts with the featured letter. For example, on the C page, the bear is taking a picture with a camera. However, when two letters share a page (I & J, X & Y), only one of the letters has a hidden picture, and on some pages, the hidden picture is the same as one of the things mentioned in the text. Some books have a lot more, and more clever, hidden pictures, so I'm giving this one just a B.

Illustrations: A. I love, love, love all of the DK books for their amazingly beautiful photography. This is actually one of the least impressive of the series, but it is still gorgeous. Everything is realistic and colorful and expertly placed on the page. This book also works well as a vocabulary-builder for infants and young toddlers.

Theme: A-. The theme of this book is teddy bears. Each letter's page has a photograph of a different teddy bear, and that bear is given a name starting with the letter. It's pretty interesting to see how much variation there can be among instances of a simple toy like a teddy bear. Additionally, cartoon bears appear at the tops of the pages, as mentioned above.

So, high marks in general here. I certainly recommend this book, especially for younger children and anyone who loves teddy bears.

Life-Size Aquarium and More Life-Size Zoo

This is just a brief update. In my post about Life-Size Zoo a few days ago, I mentioned the two sequels I had just discovered, More Life-Size Zoo and Life-Size Aquarium. These arrived from Amazon, and I want to report that: (1) these are just as awesome as the original, but (2) I would recommend them for a somewhat older age group.

Charlie loves the original Life-Size Zoo at under two and a half years old. Life-Size Aquarium scared him, and he ran away crying after seeing a few pages. Sea creatures just look weird, even the friendly ones like dolphins. More Life-Size Zoo isn't scary, but the fold-out pages are more extensive and I'm worried about the book getting damaged until he's able to handle it a bit more carefully. So these will go back on the shelf for at least six months, and probably more.

Nonetheless, the pictures are just as exciting as the original. I enjoyed looking through them myself, and I would certainly recommend these for 3- or 4-year olds.

Life-Size Zoo

Ever wondered exactly how big a koala is? Sure, you can go and see one at the zoo, but it's likely to be pretty far away and might be hiding or sleeping when you're there. For an up-close look, check out Life-Size Zoo: From Tiny Rodents to Gigantic Elephants, An Actual Size Animal Encyclopedia.

This book is a show-stopper. When they say life-size, they are not kidding. The book itself is gigantic, more than 14 inches by 10 inches, which is larger than any other book we own, including the large I Spy books you may be familiar with (post on that series forthcoming). Each page shows a photograph of a single animal in actual life size. Some are small enough to fit on a single two-page spread, like the aforementioned koala. Others feature just the head (panda, tiger). Still others have a full four-page foldout to showcase just the head (giraffe with her tongue sticking out).

The detail you can see in photographs this big is stunning. You can see gradations of color in a gorilla's fur, tiny spots on an aardvark's face, and the wrinkles around an elephant's eye. Detail-lovers will enjoy this book more than most.

The book includes a few facts about each species that is featured, and about the individual animal that is photographed. Our giraffe, for example, is a 6-year-old female named Lulu. The scientific name is listed, a few features of the photograph are pointed out in sidebar text, and some fun facts are listed as well ("Giraffes can gallop up to 35 miles an hour."). But the focus of this book is clearly on the pictures, not the textual information.

My only gripe about this book is the limited number of animals featured. There are only twenty. I wish they'd added a few more pages. Instead, they've gone the sequel route: I've just discovered More Life-Size Zoo: An All-New Actual-Size Animal Encyclopedia and Life-Size Aquarium on Amazon, and I'm ordering them right now!

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.

We Are What We Eat!

In this lovely and engaging book, We Are What We Eat!, the children build a food sculpture in the shape of a person, using a selection of fruits and vegetables. The Amazon product description claims it's a board book, but it's actually not. It's a hardcover with cardstock pages, each of which folds out. When you turn to a page, you see one of the fruits or vegetables in its whole form. Fold out the page to reveal the insides cut into various interesting shapes! Things like pits, seeds, and peels are labeled.

This book has been a staple in our household for over a year. Charlie likes to announce the various foods as they appear, and marvels over the differences between the insides and outsides. This is the first book where he ever pretended to grab the foods off the page and eat them, something he now does whenever a food appears in any book, anywhere.

This is a great one. The photographs are creative and engaging, the fold-out pages are used effectively to make the outside/inside distinction, and there's a positive health message because of all the fruits and vegetables. Definitely a winner.

The Handiest Things in the World

The Handiest Things in the World is an intriguing compare-and-contrast book about using tools. The idea is that there are many things we can do with our hands, but we can do the same things more efficiently by using the proper tool for the job. Examples: Eat with your fingers, or with chopsticks. Shade your eyes with your hand, or with a hat. Mix dough with your hands, or with a mixer.

The concept of the book is very Montessori-friendly. Having the right materials for each task is key. It's also quite pretty -- an oversized full-color photograph illustrates each job done with the hands, and on the opposite page, done with the tool. Charlie loves it, even if he's a little bit too young to understand the underlying concept of the book.

I definitely recommend this book, but there are two things that I wish were a bit improved. First, all of the text of the book rhymes, but many of the rhymes are trite or fudged. ("Digging in and scooping down. Let's move lots of dirt around.") Second, not all of the hand-tool connections make a lot of sense. For example, chopsticks are a tool to help you eat, but how many small children actually can eat more efficiently with chopsticks than with their fingers? For another example, one page shows a child counting on his fingers, then using a calculator. I think at the ages this picture book would be interesting, most kids don't understand what a calculator does. Then again, other examples are much better, such as catching a butterfly in a net, and sweeping with a broom.

Despite those few reservations, I love this book. It's an interesting concept that I haven't seen in many (any?) other children's books, and Charlie always enjoys it.

EyeLike Nature: Leaves

The EyeLike series uses amazingly beautiful photography of natural objects to tell stories and teach concepts. These have been some of our favorites, though Charlie is still too young for many of the more advanced EyeLike books. Perfect for the one-year-old set, though, are the four board books in the EyeLike Nature series: Leaves, Sticks, Stones, and Snow. For no discernible reason, Charlie fell in love with Leaves while merely liking Sticks and Stones. Understandably, since we live in Atlanta, he could never really relate to Snow. In my view, all four of them are lovely.

Each page features a colorful photo of a child interacting with some form of leaves. There are leaves growing on plants, fall leaves on the ground, piles of leaves, even a child eating salad for lunch. The text consists of a simple sentence or phrase for each picture, such as "There are leaves in my garden." I soon had the text memorized, but the pictures are so gorgeous to look at that I was rarely bored when rereading it multiple times.

Charlie also enjoys creating art projects with the various sets of EyeLike Stickers.