Where is Baby's Belly Button

 By Karen Katz

This one is also very popular.  It's a lift-the-flap book.  Plus it's all about body parts.  This is one of the very few books that my youngest will ask to read.

There is one African-American baby and there is one East-Asian baby and the rest are white.  Equal numbers of girls and boys.

So that's something.

All Around the Town

This is a book from my husband's childhood in Britain.  It's nice to have a book of British vocabulary, and it's also nice to have a super large picture book to pour over, but content wise, this is pretty sub-par compared to anything by Richard Scarry.

First off, the printing is cheap.  Some of the colours aren't printed in the lines.  The colour pallet is pretty bland and unappealing. 

The names of the characters are annoying, and only some of them have names.  The others are just "bunny" or "cat".  Though I guess that's a pretty minor complaint.

Some of the pictures have weirdly drawn perspective problems.  I'm not quite sure what's happening with this fence.  There are worse pages.  You can still tell what's going on, at least.

Scarry employs a lot of slapstick, and this book does not.  Some of the buildings featured are based on the same building frame, which is kind of boring.  My kids don't like reading the story, which is REALLY boring, but they do like looking at all of the objects and animals.

Overall, it's worth picking up if you can find it at a second hand store, but I wouldn't spend a whole bunch of money on it.

100 Things that Make Me Happy

 By Amy Schwartz

This book is great.  The art is cute, the happy things are well chosen, and it's easy enough for a beginner reader to fumble through.

 No sentences!  My daughter is trying to read, but more than two words in a row is way too much work.  This book was great to open at random and read together.

The rhymes work, the rhythm doesn't.  But it isn't supposed to be rhythmic in the least and doesn't have any kind of pattern, so that's refreshing.

Ma Journée - Mes 100 Premiers Mots

 Published by Scholastic

This book wasn't too bad.  It had a fair number of basic words, some great activities on each page to talk about, and a fun family of cats?  or bears? or something?

 They have some different words AGAIN.  I haven't seen the word "foulard" for scarf in a long time.  It is so frustrating to have so many beginner French books with so many different names for clothes.

Do you say espadrilles?  Or Soulier?  Or Chaussure? Because in English we just say "shoe" and "running shoe".  (and sure, there ARE words like "sneakers" or "wellies", but you don't get into all that nonsense with ESL students under the age of 10.)

I literally looked up the difference between all the terms just now on French Wikipedia, so now I get it, but I have never, in all my years of speaking the language, understood why there were so many terms for one item of clothing.

Back to this book.  The gimmick here is that it has labels for all the items, and when you pull the tab, the labels disappear!  Can you remember their names?

My daughter can't read, so this was useless, but distracting!  And pretty flimsy because it's a library copy, so it's being slowly destroyed.

Anyway, I wasn't that impressed.  I guess I should have learned by now that 100 words isn't actually a lot of words.

Very First French Words

 Published by Collins

I had mixed feelings about this one.  It comes with a CD which is good for parents who don't speak French.  The vocabulary is different than our Usborne French book.  Some of the different vocab is just a personal choice.  For instance, they use "être en collère", and I say "être fâché".  I hate that they sometimes use words that require prepositions when they could easily choose something else because trying to explain French prepositions to a 3 year old is a nightmare.  I learned it by ear because I was in an immersion class and was just copying a teacher that I listened to 7 hours a day.  We don't have that luxury here.

 The art is terrrrrrible.  Very obviously computer assisted.  And I can't stand that stupid monkey.  They were really trying too hard to appeal to the kids.  But they do try to work the vocabulary into a bit of a story and make pages that you can actually talk about in a bit of detail.

Ultimately, though, there just isn't enough to talk about.  The Usborne book has waaaay more vocabulary, and every page is littered with so many details and multiple recurring characters that you could read it forever.  As much as I found this Collins book useful, it wasn't $15 worth of useful.

Blue Hat, Green Hat

 By Sandra Boynton

Everyone gets this one, right?  I think.

My daughter didn't mind this book.  My son was OBSESSED with it.  As soon as he learned to walk (just before his first bithday), he would find this book, rush over to me, place it in my lap and sit patiently while I read it.  When I finished, he would grab it, flip it, and throw it back in my hands for another read-through.

It was pretty impressive because otherwise he hated storytime and wouldn't sit still for anything.

He obviously didn't understand the content.  He liked it, and still does, because it's really simplistic and very rhythmic.  He still mimics the rhythm of the text with melodic nonsense words every time he picks it up.

Tap Tap Bang Bang

 By Emma Garcia

This book is pretty lazy.  Lots of tools with googly eyes.

What the eff.

My daughter picked it out, probably for the googly eyes.

 Is this seriously meant for babies?  Does this even register with them?  The pictures bear so little semblance to the real tools.

I thought this one was a turkey baster at first.

 And this is a vise.  Sure.  And it makes a clamp, clamp sound?  When it clamps?  Is 'clamp' a word that babies are familiar with?  Is it one that you can explain to a child under the age of 2?

And then after a bunch of other tools, there's a random final page with a go-kart on it.  At which point I have to explain to my child what a go-kart is and how the tools made it and where the materials came from.

But I decided to send it back to the library instead.

 

J'aime la Pluie!

 By Hans Wilhelm

These are Scholastic books from the "Je peux lire" series in "Niveau 1".  There is one sentence per page.  There are many, many books in this series, and they all have very similar sentences with different vocabulary.  Lots of use of the verb "jouer" and words like "attends" and phrases like, "Je sais!"

Plus, you know, it's about an energetic dog.  These are fantastic.

Hairy Maclary Scattercat

 By Lynley Dodd

We've been going on a Slinky Malinki binge lately.  We had this in the house for twelve hours and it was read at least twelve times.

 Each page has a different cat that Hairy Maclary chases.  Each cat has a goofy double barrel name. A naming practice I had previously assumed was limited to Australians.

I found my daughter curled up on the couch reading the book aloud to herself, having memorized most of it.  She couldn't remember the names, though, so she made them up.  "Mamsy Pamsy" and "Anto Panto" etc.  SO ADORABLE.

Mog and Me

 By Judith Kerr

This is definitely one of our favourites.  It's a book about a cat.  It has basic everyday activities.  There's one simple sentence per page.  The art is adorable.

 My daughter has always been crazy about this book.  It is one of the best baby books I've seen with drawings rather than pictures.

Oops & Ohlala

 Illustrated by Amelie Graux

These books are pretty fantastic.  They're not comprehensive, and there's no direct translation of any of the text, so it's just basic exposure to both English and French in the same book.  I like to talk about the French sentences with my daughter, who at this point, knows a fair number of nouns and verbs, and can generally understand maybe one page out of ten.

 The outings that they go on are all trips that I do with my kids.  They even cover Christmas and Easter.  You can listen to audio recordings of the books for free on Youtube.  They have European accents (the dog is British).

Oops is the English speaking dog and Ohlala is the French speaking Koala.  I think they're supposed to be brother and sister... and they have a koala father...

But, you know, the kids won't care.

The Eric Carle Mini Library

 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.

In A People House

 By Theo LeSieg, or Dr. Seuss
Illustrated by Roy McKie

Hey, it's a Theo LeSieg book that isn't terrible.  It's a great little reader with some easy to read words, some difficult common words, and a few not-so-common and a fair bit tricky to read words that they should have left out.

 The words for objects are large and printed in red, which is nice.  The rhyming is fine, but the rhythm is off.  It's better than most LeSieg books.

The story is great.  Mouse invites bird inside house.  They explore it and name all of the objects.  The people come home and kick them out.  My daughter really loves this book because she gets the joke (which is very rarely the case).  I'm glad I picked it up.

La Glace

 By Melvin and Gilda Berger

This is a really great book with some basic information about ice.  It's hard.  It's cold.  It can be thick.  It can be thin.

You think I'm being sarcastic, but there's very little to be negative about when the source material is interesting enough and the author decides not to embellish.

For more advanced readers, there's some more in depth information about ice written in bubbles inside the pictures.

This is currently my daughter's favourite book.  She seems to like non-fiction best.  I would like to find more in this series.  Damn Scholastic Books and their unnavigable website!

The History of The Hoppers

 By B Parker
Illustrated by N Parker

A well-known children's book from 1912.

It's a pretty cute book in verse about a family of kangaroos that operates a general store.

 The verse is perfect.  No problems with meter, and the vocabulary is varied.  I love books with varied vocabulary, especially if some of it is out of date or even just a bit advanced.  It means that the book is enjoyable for me, and that my kids are learning new words all the time.

My daughter likes to listen to the poems.  They're simple enough for her to understand.  The last two lines at the bottom are always about their pet dingo and are the only lone rhyming pair.  It's a really nice form.

Each page of verse is accompanied by a large glossy coloured picture.  The colours are dull, but my daughter doesn't seem to mind.  She's actually more interested in the characters.  (The children are very naughty, which is engaging.)


This is a classic for a reason, but I would say that it's really only appropriate for kids who have a long attention span.  Probably 4 or 5 years old minimum.

I Like Animals

 By Dahlov Ipcar

This book is available in French, and it's been a great addition to our library.  It works as a picture dictionary of animals and includes all sorts of animals from every ecosystem.  There are hundreds of animals listed in the book.

 It's narrated by a boy who is daydreaming about possible animal-tending related careers in his future.  As a picture dictionary, it's good for toddlers, and as a story book, it's great for older kids.

 The limited colour pallet gives the book great character.  The art is wonderful to look at.

Of course, one of the career options is zookeeper, but not all zoos are bad.

ABC is for Circus

 By Patrick Hruby

We had a real hangup about baby books with bad art, and hunted high and low for something that we didn't hate.  This book made the cut.

 I actually really like it.  We all really like it.  The font is great.  The colours are wild.  The shapes are simple and graceful.

Even despite my hangup for circuses, I really like this book.

The words are pretty okay, for the most part.  They put calliope in there!  But they also put x-ray in, which is so lazy.  Though I'm not sure what else you can do for X.