Basher: ABC Kids

Basher: ABC Kids is a book that I love in theory, but in practice it has trouble holding Charlie's attention. He'll be interested for a few pages, maybe even half of the book, but then he'll wander off to do something else. I haven't figured out why. It's not too long, just a sentence for each letter. The illustrations are funny and attractive, with vibrant colors. Maybe the words are a bit too complex, or he's put off by the lack of rhymes. But I want so much for him to like it.... It scores very high on most of my alphabet book criteria.

Legible Capital and Lowercase: A. This is a large book (8.5 x 11 pages) with little content, so everything inside is big and bold. The individual letters are showcased in huge font on the entire bottom half of the left-hand page, capital and lowercase. The bottom of the right-hand page shows the entire alphabet in small lowercase letters, with the featured letter for that page in bold with an underline. The font is not too fancy, though Charlie did have a bit of trouble identifying the Q because of a weird tail. Some of the illustrations show characters standing or sitting on top of the letters, which can be a little bit distracting but is also really cute.

Filler Words: A+. This book has zero filler words, even though it is written in sentences! I cannot emphasize enough how rare this is. They pull off this trick by being imaginative with verbs and by writing a lot in plurals so no a/an/the is needed. "Arthur's angry ant ate apples." "Brianna bounces beautiful bugs." "Claude's crafty cuckoo collects coins." All the way through "Zack zaps zeppelins!" It's brilliant.

Cheat Words: A. They've done an excellent job picking words that legitimately start with the letters and have the correct sound. X is the hardest, of course, and they've gone with "Xavier x-rays xylophones." Not perfect, but not terrible either. I'm happy to forgive this because they did such a great job on "Queenie questions quivering quails."

Understandable Words: C. This is certainly part of what loses Charlie's interest. The book gets pretty abstract at times with words like quivering, elegant, crafty, irritable, marvelous. He has to ask what they mean, and they're not easy for me to define, either. And they can't really be drawn in the illustrations.

Sounding Out: B. Each letter gets a two-page spread. The left side has the sentence at the top and the large letters at the bottom, with an illustration of the sentence. The right side has the full alphabet at the bottom and at the top, it repeats a single word from the sentence and shows a large illustration of just that one thing. These words are pretty good for sounding out. Apple, bug, cuckoo, dog. Not all the words in the book are phonetic, but the majority of these featured ones are.

Hidden Pictures: (none).

Illustrations: A. I love the visual style of this book. It manages to be vibrant while using pastels, somehow. The characters are manga-inspired, with round faces and horizontal lines for eyes. The sentences are cleverly illustrated, even if not all of the nuances of the words can come across to a child. It's very well done.

Theme: (none).

I didn't realize until I was writing this review that Basher books are a series. There seem to be a variety about science and math topics, mainly aimed at somewhat older kids. They have great reviews on Amazon, so maybe this author is better at appealing to older kids than to the 3-year-old set. Perhaps Charlie would appreciate this book more if he were older and had a more extensive vocabulary. I suspect that he'll be well beyond alphabet books by the time he understands what an elegant elephant is, but that will not be true of all children. I love this book so much that I hope the target market manages to find it.

Dr. Seuss's ABC

At the risk of sounding unprincipled, I'm going to admit that Dr. Seuss's ABC is one of our favorite alphabet books even though it scores pretty low on several of my pre-announced factors. I think the reason is mostly familiarity. I read this so many times as a child that my parents can still, decades later, recite most of it from memory. I acquired a copy when Charlie was very young and started reading it to him frequently. It grew on all of us.

I had originally planned to rank the factors on a 1-5 scale, but letter grades is just way more appropriate, don't you think?

Legible Capital and Lower-Case: B. The book has a big capital letter on each page, and features a lowercase sample by itself on almost every page (not on O, P, and X for some reason). The lowercase letter is in the ordinary font size, though. The letters are included in the lines of text rather than set off by themselves. Still, it's pretty effective, and Charlie will point them out, often without prompting.

Filler Words: B. I'm not counting sentences like "What begins with B?" as filler, because they introduce the letter. This book is very mixed about filler words. Some pages have almost none: "Big B, little b, What begins with B? Barber baby bubbles and a bumblebee." Others have more, but they're used to pretty good effect: "O is very useful. You use it when you say: 'Oscar's only ostrich oiled an orange owl today." The only one that makes my skin crawl is the use of an N on the M page: "Big M, little m. Many mumbling mice are making midnight music in the moonlight . . . mighty nice." You might actually call that two N's and an L, as lots of kids will parse mid-night and moon-light as separate words.

Cheat Words: D. Duck-dog. Fiffer-feffer-feff. Googoo. Kerchoo. Lola Lopp. Quacker-oo. Tuttle-tuttle. Uncle Ubb.  Zizzer-Zazzer-Zuzz. It's Dr. Seuss. He makes up words. You're going to have to live with it. I do want to point out that there are a bunch of a different kind of cheat words for X, that he uses to great effect: NiXie KnoX, aX, eXtra, foX.

Understandable Words: A. This is one place where the book really shines. Dr. Seuss did an excellent job of picking out words that are recognizable and relevant to kids. Sometimes he chooses exotic animals like a Yak, but these are easy to explain and terrific for imagining. All of the words he chooses are easily illustrated, not abstract, even the verbs.

Sounding Out: C. I just don't think he paid much attention to this aspect. Some of the words are easy to sound out, others not. I believe he was writing for a company that was really into "sight words" instead of phonics. That doesn't spoil the book at all, it's just not a bonus. Anyway, by the time Charlie got interested in figuring out the other letters in a word, he'd already memorized this book.

Hidden Pictures: (none). I'm not scoring this factor in books that don't have hidden pictures, because it's optional. The illustrations here show just what's in the text, and that's that.

Illustrations: B. First the good. Every single word beginning with the featured letter is illustrated on the page, nouns, verbs, and adjectives alike. You can point to them while you're reading. One of my favorites is the letter P, which reads, "Painting pink pajamas. Policeman in a pail. Peter Pepper's puppy. And now Papa's in the pail." A completely bizarre set of things and activities, but each one is clearly drawn. The reason it's a B instead of an A is that I'm just not a huge fan of the Dr. Seuss illustration style.

Theme: (none). Also optional. No theme here, unless you count Dr. Seuss as a theme.

One unusual and very nice feature of this book is that it stops three times to review "the alphabet up until now." You read A through F, and then the G page begins with "ABCDEFG." And it fits the rhyme scheme, too! The entire alphabet-so-far is reviewed again at P and just before Z. Charlie loves this, and gets so excited to read along or sing the alphabet song at these points. I always let him say the last letter himself, and as a young toddler he was always so proud of choosing the right letter to come next. I think this is a huge part of the appeal of this book.

As an added bonus, here's Charlie at 15 months "helping" me sing the alphabet song. It's hard to believe he was ever this little!

Overall, this is a pretty good alphabet book that can draw you in with rhyme and accessibility. There are definitely some negatives. It's not my theoretical favorite, but in practice we read it over and over again. Charlie will often pull it off the shelf again after I "rotate" the active books and try to hide it, so it must be doing something right. I'll call this a moderate recommend, despite the cheat words.

Alphabet Books

I've been thinking a lot about alphabet books lately as Charlie has learned the name and sound of each letter. There are so many alphabet books on the market, and they range from fantastic to terrible, like all other books. I did a sweep of our bookshelves just now and found 18 different alphabet books, believe it or not. And that's not counting the Russian ones.

Alphabet books have their own factors to consider in addition to the things that I think about when selecting other types of books. In this post, I'm going to discuss the major factors to look for in alphabet books. Then, over the next several days, I'll review some of my favorite (and least-favorite) alphabet books and talk about how they stack up on these factors.

Legible Capital and Lowercase: Ideally, an alphabet book should have a large-print, clearly legible sample of the capital and lowercase letters by themselves. I do think it's okay for any particular book to feature just capitals or just lowercase, but it's better to show both. Overall, make sure your child is exposed to both capitals and lowercase letters. Montessori introduces lowercase letters first, because most of the letters you encounter in everyday reading are lowercase. Good theory, but too limiting in practice with all the awesome books out there that use capitals. I think kids are smart enough to catch on to seeing both at once.

Filler Words: Some alphabet books just showcase one or more individual words for each letter. Others are written in sentences. Both ways are great, but with sentences, you should watch to make sure there aren't too many filler words that start with different letters to complete the sentence. Even more important, you should check that the filler words are not made especially confusing by starting with words that look or sound similar (M on the N page, D on the B page, F on the V page).

Cheat Words: There are three types of words that I consider cheating in an alphabet book. The first type are simply made-up words -- things that have the right sounds but are not real words (e.g. Zeep). The second type are words that have the featured letter in them but don't start with that letter (e.g. fox to illustrate X). The third type are words that do start with the letter, but the letter is pronounced in an unusual way (e.g. chicken to illustrate C). These are most commonly found on the unusual letters, so check those pages carefully: Q, X, Y, Z. Some of these can be used effectively, but usually they're not.

Understandable Words: No child is going to be thrilled with an alphabet book full of words he doesn't know and has no need for. A is for Apple and Ambulance and Angry, not for Amphitheater and Algae.

Sounding Out: You're reading an alphabet book because your kid is starting to learn how to read. Once he catches on to the initial letters, you're going to want to extend the book by pointing out the other letters in each word. It gets really frustrating really fast if the words are long and complicated and have unusual pronunciations in them. On the other hand, a book full of three-letter phonetic words is really boring. This is a delicate balance.

Hidden Pictures: Many alphabet books have detailed illustrations that have many objects starting with the featured letter hiding on each page. They aren't mentioned in the text, but you can look and look and keep finding more things that start with A on the A pages, and so on through the book. I love these! They grow with the child.

Illustrations: Just like any book, the illustrations matter. They're what draw the child in, and they help alleviate the adult's boredom at going through the book a million times. Additionally, in an alphabet book, the illustrations should clearly show the words in the text. It helps the child figure out what they're reading, as they begin to do it themselves.

Theme: Alphabet books usually don't have any story to them, but some have a theme. Some themes are obvious (e.g. Texas ABC's!) and others are more subtle. Having a theme is not at all necessary, but it can be fun.

Those are the basics. Starting tomorrow, I'll review some of those 18 alphabet books that are now sitting in a stack on my desk.

A Good Day

Ever since Charlie moved from the toddler classroom to the primary classroom at his Montessori school, he's been telling me every day that he did not have a good day. I know that this is not true. His teachers tell me that he loves the classroom. I've observed through the windows and seen him absorbed in his activities, wandering around the room, and talking with the other kids. When I pick him up from the playground in the afternoon, he is almost always having a great time. And yet he keeps telling me, for a month now, that he's had a bad day.

I've been dealing with this situation on several fronts, but the aspect I want to talk about today is the concept that even though some bad things happen, or you have some sad feelings, you can still have a good day after all. I think that Charlie misses his old teachers and friends from the toddler classroom, and even though he has a great time in primary, that sad feeling (or a couple of bad incidents like falling on the playground) is turning the entire day bad in his memory.

A Good Day has been an excellent book to help with this problem. This is a very, very simple book. The first page states, without illustration, "It was a bad day. . . ." The next four pages introduce us to four different animals. Each animal has had something bad happen that day. The bird lost a tail feather. The dog got his leash tangled in the fence. The fox couldn't find his mom. The squirrel dropped her nut into a creek. "But then . . ." four more pages, each with a good thing happening that gets the animal out of its bad situation. On the last two pages, a little girl is introduced. She find the bird's tail feather and puts it in her hair, exclaiming to her mother, "What a good day!"

I used this book to introduce the idea to Charlie that bad things and good things can happen in the same day, and that even though some bad things happen in your day, it can still be a good day. I think he's catching on. From the moment I brought the book home, he was very interested in it. He's concerned for the animals as the bad things happen to them, and then he's happy together with them and the girl as good things happen. After we read the book, I usually ask him whether he can think of a bad thing and a good thing that happened in his day. He usually can't, but at least he's started being more talkative about what he's done. When he tells me things that happened, I try to point out the good things and remind him that they were good and/or fun.

The illustrations in this book are quite nice. They're done simply, but with bright and vivid colors. You can definitely see the expressions of sadness and worry in the animals' faces in the first half, and their joy in the second half.

Despite, or perhaps because of, the simplicity of this book, I've found it to be a great parenting tool for this problem that we've been having.

Caps for Sale

Caps for Sale is an awesome book. If you don't own it already, you need to go buy a copy right now. I'll wait here until you get back. Okay, okay, you can read the review first if you really have to. But trust me, this is a great one. I loved it as a child, Charlie loves it now, and I still love it as an adult.

The story of this book is very simple. A peddler sells caps, walking around town with all the caps stacked on top of his head in a huge tower. One day, nobody wants to buy any caps, so he goes for a walk in the countryside and falls asleep under a tree. When he wakes up, he finds that all the caps are missing, except for his own cap. Looking around, he finds that a group of monkeys have taken his caps and escaped up a tree. How will he get them back?

This book has some serious staying power. Charlie is as obsessed with the book at almost-three years old as he was at 18 months. The story is cleverly told, but with lots of repetitive phrases to draw in young children. For example, whenever the book mentions his caps, it talks about "[the peddler's] own checked cap, then a bunch of gray caps, then a bunch of brown caps, then a bunch of blue caps, and on the very top, a bunch of red caps." There are plenty of opportunities to count the caps and point out their colors.

The best part of the book is the story of how the peddler tries to get his caps back from the monkeys. The illustrations are great -- the peddler in his suit and cap standing at the base of the tree, looking up, and the monkeys hanging from the branches, each wearing one of his caps. The peddler is a little bit angry, but he's pretty sure he can work things out with a simple appeal.

"You monkeys, you," he said, shaking a finger at them, "you give me back my caps."
But the monkeys only shook their fingers back at him and said, "Tsz, tsz, tsz."

This made the peddler angry, so he shook both hands at them and said, "You monkeys, you! You give me back my caps."
But the monkeys only shook both their hands back at him and said, "Tsz, tsz, tsz."

A few pages later, the peddler is so angry that he's essentially having a temper tantrum, stomping his feet and waving his fists and shouting at the monkeys up in the tree. And the monkeys are still playing their game, imitating everything he does. And then the peddler gives up.

At last he became so angry that he pulled off his own cap, threw it on the ground, and began to walk away.

The monkeys have been copying everything he does up to now, and surprise, surprise, they copy this action, too. They throw the caps to the ground and leave the peddler alone.

So the peddler picked up his caps and put them back on his head--first his own checked cap, then the gray caps, then the brown caps, then the blue caps, then the red caps on the very top.

And slowly, slowly, he walked back to town calling, "Caps! Caps for sale! Fifty cents a cap!"

I absolutely love the way they show the peddler's temper tantrum progressing bit by bit as he gets angrier. And particularly, how all of his yelling and screaming and shouting doesn't work at all. It's a great lesson for kids (and grownups!) about how not to convince someone to do what you want.

The other thing I really love about this story is the way the mood progresses in a cycle. It's very calm at the beginning, and then it builds up the huge emotional temper tantrum in the middle, and then once the peddler gets his caps back, it returns to the same calm and peaceful tone of the beginning. I've been looking for books to help Charlie deal with his emotions, and I think Caps for Sale gives an excellent model of how to calm back down and accept the good after an emotional outburst.

A note on versions and ages: I bought the board book version of Caps for Sale when Charlie was about 18 months old. He loved it and wanted to read it every day. Unfortunately, we lost the book while we were on vacation a few months later. Eventually I got around to buying a new one, and since Charlie was two and a half by that time, I went for the paperback instead of the board book. It turns out that the board book leaves out some interesting details of the story, but nothing crucial. I would recommend going straight for the paperback. You can buy the paperback alone, or for just an extra two dollars, you can get it packaged together with a CD that narrates the story and adds some songs. In my opinion, the songs are just so-so, but Charlie loves listening to it in the car. This is the first book-CD package I've tried, but I will certainly be doing some more in the future.

Caps for Sale gets my absolute highest recommendation. It's a wonderful story, well-written, with great lessons, and has excellent power to hold a child's interest.

This Is the Rain

We've been on something of a kick with cumulative poems lately, with some I've reviewed before and another one that I'm planning to review soon. Today's cumulative poem is This Is the Rain. I was a bit nervous when I picked it up at the library right as we were running to check out, because I thought it might be full of environmentalist nonsense. But in fact it's not, and it turned out to be a solid choice.

The book is about the water cycle, and with each verse of the poem it introduces a new phase of the cycle. It begins, "This is the ocean, blue and vast, that holds the rainwater from the past." Next it introduces sunshine, then water vapor, then clouds. Finally we see actual rain, and then the land that absorbs the water, and the puddles that form after a storm. On the last page, we see running water, creeks and rivers that flow back into the sea. It's a very effective introduction that touches all parts of the water cycle in a catchy poem without cumbersome scientific explanation that would be too much for a toddler.

The illustrations are not really my style, but some people might like them. It's that sort of modern style that I sometimes describe as "throw a lot of relevant things onto the page in random places." So, the night sky is full of ... starfish, and the seahorses stick their noses out of the water. Oh yeah, and there's a random apatosaurus at the bottom of the ocean. Whatever. The colors are quite vivid, however, and all of the items are real if their placement leaves something to be desired.

In sum, this is a nice one to read a few times, but I wouldn't have purchased it.

Birds

I am thoroughly impressed with Birds, a book I picked up at a garage sale last weekend. Have I mentioned how much I love garage sales? Anyway, Birds veers wildly back and forth from straightforward to whimsical, somehow managing to tie the two into a lovely package.

One page points out all the different colors birds can be. Another remarks on their variety of sizes. And another imagines (and illustrates!) what the sky would look like if birds made marks with their tail feathers when they flew through the air. Vibrant colors woosh through the sky. Brilliant!

Other pages are told from a child's first person perspective. One two-page spread is illustrated with seven birds sitting on a telephone wire, copied three times, with the birds in exactly the same positions from picture to picture. "Once I saw seven birds on the telephone wire. They didn't move and they didn't move and they didn't move." I looked away for just a second . . . " (page turn) "and they were gone." A thick black telephone wire slices through the otherwise empty page.

Charlie cannot read this book just once. He's asked for it many times since I brought it home, and each time he has to read it at least twice in a row, sometimes more. He loves to point out all the colors of the birds and says some of the surprising punch lines along with me. This is a real gem!