Sleepy Time/On the Farm/Let’s Play/Going on a Picnic
By Gina Ford
This is not a downbeat review but these books seem quite ordinary when you first see them. After all we have already gone through numerous lift-the-flap or touchy-feely books with Tom (aged 20 months). But this series of small board books does seem to stand the test of time.
Tom loved them immediately and happily goes back to them time and again. For starters they are all exactly the right size and weight for Tom’s small hands as right now he loves to lie on his back and look at a book just before sleep.
So they got the size right, why else are these so good? What all four of this set does very well is take an existing formula, identify the best elements and accentuate these. The pictures are simple, the pages aren’t overloaded (sparse even), and bright colours illuminate some simple first words. The characters are likeable, the situations undemanding and yet each book’s theme is supplemented by some testing language. It was our experience that there was not one picture in any of the set that a 2 year-old would not know and so Tom approached each page confidently enough to allow us to tackle this harder vocabulary.
These books superficially look like a hatful of others written for the same audience, but what these do so well is identify why that audience would want to return. No surprises then to the well read toddler but this could well be the series that eclipses all others in a similar vein within the next couple of years.
To continue on my voyage of discovery through Ford’s newest range I was to spend some time with the latest Kuga Titanium in its 2.0-litre diesel guise.
30 Something and the Clock is Ticking
