By Eric Carle
This is a great little gift set that seems to be pretty popular. The stories in it are actually pretty good. There are some problems, but they're easy to gloss over.
The problem with Rooster's Off to See the World is that the narrative is terrible. But it's a counting story, and you count animals, so it's great for kids. The ending is underwhelming, but I just play up the fact that rooster is getting a really good nap in and that he's really happy, and nobody seems to care.
This book is basically perfect, but I didn't read the text until my daughter was much older. She was obsessed with this book, and she still picks up sticks outside so that she can cut the pretend wheat with her sickle.
It's basically a long-form pancake recipe.
Another great book. This one has lots of pop-ups. It has contributed greatly to our daughter's moon obsession. I think she literally expects us to get the moon for her at some point, still. One of the pop-up pages is ripped. It was inevitable.
There are many problems with this book. The main narrative of a hermit crab collecting sea things for his shell is great because it teaches about the life of the hermit crab, and also about the names of different things found in the sea. (Although it omits that crazy shell exchange that they do and says instead that the hermit crab travels for a full month before he finds a new shell. That's a little frustrating.)
The rest of the book is trying to do too much. It tries to introduce months, which doesn't work because there's no way to make that concept any less arbitrary to a toddler who has limited memory anyway. Each page where he collects a new friend is written the same way with different vocabulary. But so little remains the same, and the vocabulary is so varied, and there's nothing to show exactly what any of the words mean. So all of the language education in this book is totally lost on a young audience.
All in all, this is a great collection, though. We love the colours, too.
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