Bears On Wheels

 By Stan and Jan Berentsain

Not Berenstein, as everyone seemingly used to pronounce it.

This book is amazing!  It teaches basic math!  I wouldn't call it an amazing counting book.  There are better books for that.

 The bears' shirts are different colours and the different vehicles that they ride or drive have different numbers of wheels.  It has 2+2, 1+3, 1+4, 5+5 and a few others.  Nothing incredibly difficult.  It's just a nice visual representation of the concept of adding and is really appealing to preschoolers.

My daughter seems to understand addition and I sincerely believe that this book made a big impact on that development.

Friday Post - Place and Trace

This is an amazing toy that I got for a dollar at the local thrift store.  Three large yellow stencils that hold four traceable objects each.  The objects are animals, dinosaurs and vehicles, they're three dimensional and can be used as cookie cutters or molds for play-dough or sand.

Currently, we just play with it as a puzzle.  Which is great.  The kids love it, and they're going to use it for a long time.

Made by Discovery Toys

Richard Scarry's Best Storybook Ever

 We love Richard Scarry so much.  His books are old, though, and often compiled kind of weirdly.  This is no exception.

"I am a Bunny" is featured in this book, but most of the pages are missing, and there's an extra page with insects on it that isn't in our board book version.

Other stories seem to be complete.  The nursery rhymes are scattered throughout.  The prints are of varying degrees of quality.

You take what you can get, though.

 Not all of the stories are good, but the ones that we like to read are fantastic.  They label instruments, they explain colour theory, there's counting and letters and all kinds of educational fun.

My favourite is the alphabet of things to feed and not feed a hippo.  My daughter is on the edge of understanding comedy. If you ask her whether we should feed the hippo a nest or a nut, she will angrily explain that she already picked out the banana on the first page.

I'm sure she'll get the joke in a year or two.

Cars and Trucks

 This is another Richard Scarry board book.  We have this one and the "Richard Scarry ABC's" which features a lot of the same cars, but has different illustrations and is definitely a different book.

 This book has a great mix of real and imaginary vehicles.  It explains what the vehicles do and organizes them into categories.  It's much better than a lot of the weirdly boy-oriented rough and tumble vehicle books I've seen for babies.

I don't get tired of reading these books.  There's very little text, so we often just look at the pictures and talk about what we see.

I am a Dump Truck

 A scolastic book, uncredited again.

I'm not sure how I feel about this whole large vehicles talking in the first person thing.  I suppose that's how kids talk.  Maybe because they learn it from these books?

It's nowhere near as engaging as Mike Mulligan or Katy, and I suspect that it's intended for boys.  But it's built like a truck that comes apart, so it's like a toy, too.

My daughter liked this book for a bit.  She still can't tell all of the vehicles apart, though.  Mostly because she likes to correct me as I'm reading.  Apparently they're ALL "diggers".