Review: The Cheerios Play Book

I hope nobody else has caught the fun new cold/flu that's been going around in these parts.  We're on day 5 of coughing/snotting/laryngitis baby, which hasn't been fun for anyone.  Especially since Boo's lack of vocal chord cooperation has dropped my understanding of him from 70% of the time to about 30%.  Frustration all 'round, anyone?

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Title: The Cheerios Play Book

Author/Illustrator: Lee Wade
Publisher: Little Simon

Year: 1998
ISBN: 978-1862910959
Format: Board Book
Pages: 14
Age Range: Baby, Toddler
Kid Love Factor: 3/5
Adult Sanity Factor: 2/5

The Cheerios Play Book is a bit different than most books we've reviewed.  For one, it's a glorified ad campaign.   I'm not the fondest of books that exist merely to sell a product and this one is more blatant than most.  And two, it's not exactly a book that's going to get kids riveted on reading; there's not much of a story, per se.

That being said, what it is good for is practicing manual dexterity, counting, and imagination.  Each layout in the book has an illustration and with photographic Cheerios taking the place of round objects like tires, buttons, glasses, or bubbles.  There are also holes where tots can place real Cheerios (or Nutrios, or generic O cereal; shh, don't tell General Mills) to finish the pictures.

Boo's a bit of a fan.  He doesn't pull the book out very often, but when he does stumble across it, he's instantly in the kitchen where he rifles through the cabinet until he finds the current box of pseudo-Cheerios to lug back with him.  He'll happily dig into the box, pull out a handful, place the Cheerios in the holes, eat them, and move onto the next page.  Woe betides my kitchen and living room floors if I'm not paying attention when all this occurs.  Boo is all the proof physicists need to support chaos theory.

Autism Spectrum Bonus: Apart from a brief period in early neurotypical toddlerhood, this book seems to be entirely Autism Spectrum Bonus.  Assuming your child likes Cheerios or another small roundish food that will fit in the holes, the book is well suited to working on fine motor skills like pincher grasping and object placement.  It's also good for practicing having you child follow a proximal point as you initially direct them to the Cheerios and the holes for them.  Boo's been making progress in recognizing that small shapes, in this case circles, can make up parts of a larger whole.  We're also using it to help introduce counting to Boo; he can already recite an impressive length of numbers (with a few logical errors like twenty-ten following twenty-nine) and can identify the first 25 or so by symbol before he starts getting confused, but he's still not quite making the link that OOOO is four objects, though he can now reliably recognize O, OO, and OOO as one, two, and three, respectively.

We just use the book casually when Boo shows interest, but I can see it being useful in more formalized therapies as well.

Bottom Line:
It's an ad, but if you can overlook that, it's a useful one.

Links:

The Cheerios Play Book (Canada)

The Cheerios Play Book (USA)

Review: Do You Love Me?

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Title: Do You Love Me?
Author/Illustrator: Joost Elffers
Publisher: HarperCollins
Year: 2008
ISBN: 0061667994
Format: Hardcover
Pages: 32
Age Range: Baby, Toddler, Preschooler
Kid Love Factor: 3.5/5
Adult Sanity Factor: 2.5/5

Do You Love Me? is in a rhyming question and answer format between adults and children.  Each page has a question, with the answer on the following layout.  The graphics are simple and computer-generated, but strangely compelling, with an insecure child and a loving adult of various sorts spread throughout.

Do you love me?
Always, dear.
Do you need me?
Ever near.

It's short.  It's sweet.  It's brightly-coloured.  It's pretty much perfect for snuggling the toddler in your life.  And because it's so short, it's not anywhere near as painful to read repeatedly as might otherwise be the case.

Boo always loves the opportunity to answer direct questions, provided you're someone he knows and cares about.  He happily answers "Yes!" or "No-oo" in all the appropriate places.  He's also (thankfully!) a cuddly little creature most of the time, so he took to snuggling during the book like a champ.

Autism Spectrum Bonus: Do You Love Me? is about expressing fondness, love, and affection.  Some little spectrumites may have missed signs of love their parents or caregivers consider obvious; this book, along with some explanation, might help clarify matters. The "Hug me, hold me, snug and tight.  Snuzzle closer, kiss goodnight" section at the end might also help garner you a little extra cuddly affection if there aren't too many sensory issues in the way.  If there are, the 'snuzzle', what I would have inaccurately (and politically incorrectly in Canada) called an "Eskimo kiss" as a child, might give an extra affection-displaying option you haven't previously considered trying.

Bottom Line:
Would you read me?
Often here.

Links:

Do You Love Me? on Amazon.ca

Do You Love Me? on Amazon.com

Review: Mommy, Mama, and Me

Here's our second installment celebrating Banned Books Week:

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Title: Mommy, Mama, and Me

Author: Lesléa Newman (website)

Illustrator: Carol Thompson

Publisher: Tricycle Press
Year: 2009
ISBN: 978-1582462639
Format: Board Book
Pages: 18
Age Range: Baby, Toddler, Preschooler
Kid Love Factor: 2.5/5
Adult Sanity Factor: 3/5

Mommy, Mama, and Me alternates telling what Mommy and Mama do for their young toddler over the course of a day.  They play and cuddle and cook and snack and read and bathe and (hopefully for the moms' sake) eventually sleep.  The toddler is delightfully androgynous, making it easy for any little girl or boy to step into his or her day.


Mommy picks me up, up, up
Mama pours juice in my cup.


Mommy, Mama and Me has of course qualified for review during banned books week due to its portrayal of a presumably lesbian couple.  The entire focus of both women is the child, and they're only rarely on the same page together, but the trio is clearly a family, and the love the women both have for their baby is clear.


I think it's important for every child to be able to find decent books about people like them and their families.  I know when Boo's a bit older I'll be doing my best to find books with accurately and positively portrayed autistic characters.  I also think it's important to expose Boo to books about people who are different from us; the more familiar something is, the less likely it is to be something to fear or disparage.

All that being said, while the rhyming text is cute, the pictures well done, and the message important, this would get pretty monotonous 15 times in a row, so I can't make myself give it a higher Adult Sanity Factor.


Boo is not overly interested in Mommy, Mama, and Me.  He's outgrown most board books of this simplicity, though he was happy enough to sit through it a couple of times, especially if I emphasized the page where Mama and the toddler go down a slide.   I think it would have been more of a hit about six to twelve months ago for its absolute content.  For the more controversial aspect, I'm not sure he understood that the two ladies were both mothers to the child.  For one, we're still working on the whole Mommy is a girl and Daddy and Boo are boys concept, so I'm not sure he gets that a man and a woman make up the average set of parents.  For two, we still use Mommy (what my husband and I call me) and Mama (what Boo calls me) interchangeably, so I'm also not sure he really gets that the book is portraying two separate women.  Many toddlers will be able to start having conversations about different family types before they lose interest in the other content of this book; sadly, Boo is not one of them.


If reading about a family with two dads is of more interest to you, Newman and Thompson also collaborated on Daddy, Papa, and Me.   While we haven't read that one, I imagine its quite similar, though the child looks like he or she may be slightly older.


Autism Spectrum Bonus:  Mommy, Mama, and Me goes through a lot of average every day activities like having a nap and playing in the park, so if your child craves reading about the familiar (while learning about something that may not be familiar), this is a good choice.  As I said above, the love both women have for the child and the child has for each woman is very clear and may help with discussions on expressing affection.  It's also a good starting point for reassuring kids that it's okay to be different and that different doesn't mean bad.

Bottom Line:
Mommy's glad a need is filled,
Mama knows Boo's not as thrilled.

Links:

Mommy, Mama, and Me at Amazon.ca

Mommy, Mama, and Me at Amazon.com

Review: Flaptastic Sizes

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Title: Flaptastic Sizes
Author/Illustrator: See publisher
Publisher: Dorling Kindersley Publishing
Year: 2009
ISBN: 978-0756654511
Format: Board book
Pages: 12
Age Range: Baby, Toddler
Kid Love Factor: 3.5/5
Adult Sanity Factor: 2/5

Flaptastic Sizes is a lift-the-flap book that teaches, well, sizes.  Surprise!  Didn't see that coming, did you?

Each page spread has a picture and a size descriptor, and then the flap can be lifted and an opposing descriptor and picture is seen.  Kids learn that daisies are short while sunflowers are tall, elephants are big while chicks are small,, paint brushes can be wide or narrow, and acorns are tiny while trees are enormous.  Lots of fun vocabulary-stretching words to be had here.  It’s awesome having your toddler describe something as “Eeee-no-muss”.

My one real peeve is the set of Russian dolls at the end. They’re lovely, of course, as Russian dolls tend to be.  The problem is that there are seven of them and they’re labelled Biggest, Bigger, Big, Middle, Small, Smaller, Tiny.  Seriously?  Tiny? They couldn’t finish that off symmetrically with ‘smallest’ instead of ‘tiny’?  And shouldn't middle be medium? Gah!

My nearly compulsive desire for linguistic order aside, Boo was fond of the book, though he seems to be outgrowing it now.  He especially loves the flowers; we were often treated to top-of-his-lungs exclamations of “Sunflower!”  and eventually, once we’d read Lemons Are Not Red,  “Sunflower is not short! Sunflower is tall. Daisies are short!”   

My other peeve is that the acorn described as tiny is in fact pictured at approximately 200% of an actual acorn's size, but I find that quite bearable compared to the issue with the dolls.  Yes, sometimes my quibbles are ridiculous even to myself...

Autism Spectrum Bonus: As with neurotypical children, Flaptastic Sizes might help to get the concept of quantifier adjectives across.  The lift-the-flap design may encourage kids who are usually less than eager to participate to follow their curiosity and check out what’s underneath.  For very young kids or those with fine motor skill delays, the multiple directions in which the pages open may provide an interesting challenge.

Bottom Line:

Good and Bad.

Links:

Flaptastic Sizes at Amazon.ca

Flaptastic Sizes at Amazon.com

Review: Mommy Hugs

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Title: Mommy Hugs

Author: Anne Gutman

Illustrator: Georg Hallensleben
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Year: 2003
ISBN: 978-0811839167
Format: Board Book
Pages: 14
Age Range: Baby, Toddler
Kid Love Factor: 3/5
Adult Sanity Factor: 3/5

Mommy Hugs shows various animal babies and how their mothers hug them on each spread of pages.

Mommy cat hugs her kitten with a nuzzle.

There are cats, elephants, monkeys, polar bears, swans, and parrots. It ends with the human narrator explaining how his/her mother hugs him/her.

Not only does this book give you the opportunity to snuggle with your child in a variety of ways, it’s also teaching that animals (at least some of them) also care for their families, and even functions as a vocabulary expander between the animal baby names (swans have cygnets, in case you’ve forgotten from elementary school) and the near-synonyms for hug.

Mommy Hugs is one of those books we read repeatedly for three days in a row before Boo forgets about it for months. I’m not sure if this is a function of his waxing and waning enjoyment of it, or simply because it’s a small book that tends to get lost behind his multitude of others. Not that small is bad; A) it’s nice a portable, and B) it goes missing often enough I don’t get too sick of it.

For the more male parents out there, there’s also Daddy Cuddles by the same creators. As we haven’t read that one I can’t speak about it directly, but I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest it's pretty similar.

Autism Spectrum Bonus: This book gives lots of opportunity to indulge children who crave tactile sensory input. Luckily for us, for the most part Boo is a hugger/snuggler/crawls-all-over-mommy-and/or-daddy-er. For kids who are more averse to contact, it might be a way to try to explore various ‘hugs’ that might be less disliked than your average neurotypical’s standard offering. Perhaps a polar bear-like tickle would be better, or maybe a cat-like nuzzle or a monkey-like pat. Or something not mentioned in the book but that the book leads you to discover. We also found this book to be a great way to build anticipation in Boo’s early communication days. He soon learned that he’d get a tickle on the polar bear page and his grins and vocalizations as he waited for it were priceless.

Bottom Line:
Mommy readers hug their readlits around a book.
Links:

Mommy Hugs at Amazon.ca

Mommy Hugs at Amazon.com

Review: Lemons Are Not Red

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Title: Lemons Are Not Red

Author/Illustrator: Laura Vaccaro Seeger
Publisher: Roaring Brook Press
Year: 2004
ISBN: 978-1596430082
Format: Hardcover, also available in Paperback
Pages: 32
Age Range: Baby, Toddler, Preschooler
Kid Love Factor: 5/5
Adult Sanity Factor: 3/5

I saw Lemons Are Not Red reviewed over at Infant Bibliophile’s site. Since we’ve been trying for weeks to get Boo to solidly understand negation, I figured this would be perfect.

It so was.

The yellow opening page declares:

Lemons are not RED.

There’s a lemon-shaped cut-out which clearly displays a red lemon. But once you turn the page, the lemon cut-out is now over the yellow background, and the red former background is revealed to be a nice big apple.

Lemons are YELLOW.
Apples are RED.

The pattern continues through orange carrots and purple eggplants, pink flamingos and grey elephants, brown reindeer and white snowmen, green grass and the blue sky, and ends with the silver moon and the black night. Good night!

This was an instant hit. Boo loves naming colours, so I knew he’d be intrigued, but I failed to predict the height of toddler awesometude that this would be. Now everything is “not”. Car not pink! Duck not turtle! Which you’d think would be a bad thing, and maybe it soon will be (like when he gets to “Boo not hungry!”, or worse, “Boo not tired!”), but for now I’m pleased. As a nice bonus, he’ll now “read” it to himself, word for word, which is excellent as my threshold for the number of times this is good to read in a row is substantially lower than his.

I’m quite sure Boo has no idea what an eggplant is (because, um, BLECH!), but he knows that they're purple. I’ll have to locate one to show him next time we’re at the grocery store.

Autism Spectrum Bonus: Not too much beyond what neurotypical kids will glean from it. This one suited Boo in that it catered to his colour Special Interest and helped explain the "not" concept we’d been struggling with. To be honest, I’m not entirely sure if the issue was due to his communication delay, or because I’d done a crap job of modelling. Either way, problem solved. Boo also find the cut-out and how it changes colour from one side to the other fascinating. I imagine it’d be just as much so for any highly visually-oriented kiddo.

Bottom Line:
This book is not AWFUL
This book is GOOD
Eggplants are AWFUL

Links

Lemons Are Not Red on Amazon.ca

Lemons Are Not Red on Amazon.com

Review: Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?

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Title: Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?
Author: Bill Martin, Jr. (website)
Illustrator: Eric Carle (website)
Publisher: Henry Holt and Company, LLC
Year:  1996
ISBN: 978-0805047905
Format: Board Book
Pages: 26
Age Range: Baby, Toddler, Preschooler, Early Reader
Kid Love Factor: 4/5
Adult Sanity Factor: 2.5/5

Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? is of course a classic.  Originally published in 1967, this one’s been around long enough it’s technically possible that its first readers are sharing it with their grandchildren.  Okay, so they’d have to have had children young and their children had to have children young, but it is possible.  Without any laws having been broken, even. </weird tangent>

Brown Bear,
Brown Bear,
What do you see?
I see a red bird looking at me.

Each page has a colourful Eric Carle illustration of the animal being questioned, who sees another animal, who is in turn questioned on the next page.  Eventually, the chain of animals leads to a goldfish in a classroom, a teacher, and the children who can see everyone along the way.  Cue summary page!

The book is wonderful visual stimulation for babies, encourages animal and colour identification in toddlers and preschoolers, and the simplicity and repetition of the text should make it a win for beginning readers, too. The group of children at the end are a delightful mix of genders and ethnicities; every child should be able to find someone that looks reasonably similar to them.  Hmm.  I'd be interested in knowing if the original spread in the 1967 edition was as ethnically diverse.  

Boo has loved this book since he was about 9 months old.  We always read it in the same rhythm, with the same intonation, and we were (eventually) rewarded with the first large-scale verbal mimicry from him.  “BROWN bear, BROWN bear, WHAT do YOU SEE?”  translated to “DUM da DUM da MA ba MA BA!”, which he would do repeatedly while turning the pages, effectively reading to himself.  It’s also one of the books (along with Bright Baby Colors) that brought out his first proximal points.  His ability to jab a finger at the yellow duck on command was a brilliant moment in our house.

It’s a fun read, but repetition does get fairly tedious after the third time in a row, hence the middle of the road Adult Sanity Factor.  Especially when you throw Polar Bear, Polar Bear, What Do You Hear into the mix...

Autism Spectrum Bonus: The brightly coloured and stylized animals are alone on a white (or black, in the case of the white dog) page, with no distracting backgrounds to take away from listening to the rhythm of the text or learning the animals and colours.  The teacher is also alone on her page, which may allow for eye contact practice on something recognizably human but stylized enough to be (possibly?) reasonably comfortable.  And because the text is repeated so often, it’s the perfect book to pause during, hopefully eliciting continuing vocalizations in kids who don’t do so often. 

Bottom line:

Brown Bear, Brown Bear, what do you see?
I see a series purchased by me.  (sigh)

Links:

Brown Bear, Brown Bear at Amazon.ca

Brown Bear, Brown Bear at Amazon.com

Review: Rock-a-Bye Farm

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Title: Rock-a-Bye Farm

Author: Diane Johnston Hamm
Illustrator: Alexi Natchev (website)
Publisher: Little Simon
Year: 2008
ISBN: 978-1416939213
Format: Board Book
Pages: 32
Age Range: Baby, Toddler, Preschooler
Kid Love Factor: 3/5
Adult Sanity Factor: 3/5

Rock-a-Bye Farm starts off very normally with:

It’s bedtime.
The farmer rocks his baby.
When the baby goes to sleep...

Once the human baby goes to sleep, things get rapidly sillier:

The farmer rocks his dog.

And on the next page:

When the dog is snoring loudly...

Once the dog is asleep, he rocks his hens.  Once the hens are asleep, he rocks his sheep.  Et cetera.  The brightly coloured illustrations get progressively more humorous along with the text.  The farmer uses an apron to rock the hens.  He presses a hay bale above his head to rock the sheep.  He uses a door balanced on a wooden barrel to rock his cow and a hammock to rock his horse.  Once everyone is finally asleep, the farmer rocks himself.  Good night!

We’ve been using Rock-a-Bye Farm to both reinforce Boo’s animal sounds and to teach the concepts of loud (highly successful) and quiet (not so much).  On one spread of pages, when the farmer is rocking the cow, we yell “MOO!!”  On the next spread, when the cow is asleep, we (and by ‘we’, I mean me) whisper “moo”.  Rinse and repeat for the other animals.  Let’s just say Boo’s starting to get it, but it’s a work in progress.

I don’t think this will ever become one of Boo’s favourite books, but he’s intrigued enough to want to read it about once a day right now.  And while it’s unlikely to become one of my favourites either, it’s not one I loath to see approaching.

Autism Spectrum Bonus: As I said, we’ve been using Rock-a-Bye Farm to reinforce animal imitation and loud/quiet voices.  Older kids (i.e. ones with a better grasp of basic physics than Boo) may enjoy the visual humour of the farmer having to use elaborate methods to rock his various animals to sleep.  For those with fairly rigid bedtime routines, Rock-a-Bye Farm could be a good addition to story time, if the 4087^th rendition of Goodnight Moon is starting to wear you down.

Links:

Rock-a-Bye Farm on Amazon.ca

Rock-a-Bye Farm on Amazon.com

Review: There was an old lady who swallowed a fly

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Title: There was an old lady who swallowed a fly
Author/Illustrator: Pam Adams
Publisher: Child’s Play International
ISBN: 978-0859530217
Format: Board Book, also in paperback and hardcover
Pages: 18
Age Range: Baby, Toddler, Preschooler
Kid Love Factor: 4/5
Adult Sanity Factor: 2.5/5

There was an old lady who swallowed a fly once sat solidly in the list of Boo’s favourite books; for many months, we ‘read’ it together almost every evening. I use the term read loosely in this case. Because this is such a classic children’s story/song, I don’t actually pay much attention to the words. In fact, once Boo can read for himself, we’re going to need a long discussion on regional differences and why Mommy sings the story slightly ‘wrong’.

The titular old lady appears on the cover, smiling benevolently at all who behold her. She’s rather eclectically dressed and can’t be described as anything less than morbidly obese. Which is about what you’d expect from someone who can swallow an entire cow, I suppose. Also visible is a small blue fly in the center of her belly.

Once you open the cover, you’re again greeted by the same image. But this time, the fly in her belly is visible due to a hole in this page and all the ones that follow it. The fly is actually part of the illustration on page 16. Opposite, there’s a brightly coloured page with another picture of our poor little blue fly, this time flying and sans elderly gastric juices, but with a big green spider on a nearby web.

The following page is similar, only this time the hole in the old lady’s stomach on the right is large enough that you can now see the green spider that surrounds the fly on page 16. On the left is the spider with an approaching robin.

The book continues like this, all the way through the traditional bird, cat, dog, cow, and horse verses. Each animal is pictured on the appropriate page, with a foreshadowing image of the next animal in the sequence beside it. The hole on the right continues to get larger to let you see each surrounding animal, and the hole on the left nicely reminds you of the previous verses on the off chance you haven’t already read or sung the lyrics 87,631 times already. The spiral text may be good practice for those just starting to get a handle on this whole reading gig, too.

After the final verse, there's an extra double page spread that repeats the entire song and has a picture of the old lady chasing a horse, who's chasing a cow, who's chasing a dog, etc.

Although I’m very fond of the illustration of the old lady herself, I can’t say the animals thrill me very much. They’re quite stylized, which they have to be to fit in the not-exactly-natural setting they find themselves in, but I don’t find most of them to be aesthetically pleasing. Boo, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to mind at all. The drawings and backgrounds are certainly brightly coloured, which provides ample visual stimulation.

On the up side, the spider picture is stylized enough that even an arachnophobe like me has no trouble looking at it. Though come to think of it, maybe this book is the reason I'm having the trouble I am with this one.

As I said, I don’t typically read this book to Boo; I sing the song as I was taught it. There are only minor differences between this book’s version and the one I grew up with, the main one of which lets me add a bit of a game to the song. Every time we sing the line about the spider, which is “wiggled and jiggled and giggled inside her” in my version (as opposed to “wriggled and wriggled and jiggled”), Boo gets tickle attacked. This results in loud baby laughter just in time for the word ‘giggled’. Great for building interactions and anticipation as well as basic animal labelling.

There was
An old lady
Who swallowed a horse.

She’s dead, of course.

Autism Spectrum Bonus: The book is very brightly coloured, which may appeal either more or less to those with sensory processing differences than to the more neurotypical among us. There are lots of opportunities to encourage imitation through animal noises, gestures, or signs. The repetitive nature of the book may also be good for prompting otherwise rare vocalizations. This was one of the first books to allow Boo to anticipate and seek out contact. Before long, he'd be leaning into us when we got to the spider line, anticipating his tickle. If we were singing the song while doing something else, he'd always make sure to come within arms' reach for the spider's segment as well, just so we'd make him giggle. Very rewarding interaction (i.e. pure glee) for his parents, and fun for him. For older and/or more verbal children, there can be discussions about the old lady's viewpoint and why she thought eating all those animals was a good idea even when your child clearly knows differently. Some kids may also be interested in talking about why the ending is humourous.

Bottom Line:
There was a cute board book with colours and holes,
Not bad, all told.
Links:

There was an old lady who swallowed a fly on Amazon.ca

There was an old lady who swallowed a fly on Amazon.com

Review: Dig Dig Digging by Margaret Mayo

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Title: Dig Dig Digging

Author: Margaret Mayo
Illustrator: Alex Ayliffe
Publisher: Henry Holt and Company, LLC
Year: 2006
ISBN: 978-0805079852
Format: Board Book
Pages: 22
Age Range: Baby, Toddler, Preschooler
Kid Love Factor: 5/5
Adult Sanity Factor: 3/5

Dig Dig Digging is full of the large vehicles that many toddlers love, complete with rhythmic, onomatopoeic phrasing.

Diggers are good at dig, dig, digging,
scooping up the earth, and lifting and tipping.
They make huge holes with their dig, dig, digging.
They can work all day.

The book goes through 10 different machines, from construction vehicles like diggers and road rollers to emergency vehicles like fire engines to service vehicles like garbage trucks. Each spread of pages describes the machine and what it's good at, then finishes with "They can work all day".

It's cute, it's catchy, it's...kinda irritating. It's also Boo's favourite right now. With lots of action words and sound effects, this book is practically made for expanding toddler vocabularies and imitation. Not to mention their recognition of vehicles. The illustrations are colourful and effective but not very detailed. True vehicle-lovers will likely demand more-photorealistic options, but Boo is thus far content and now very excited to see a garbage truck on the street, something he'd never before been interested in.

Autism Spectrum Bonus: The abundance of verbs is great for expanding language or comprehension, an especially nice bonus if you're struggling to introduce action words to a very concrete thinker. There's also lots of machine-noise words for encouraging imitation. Boo enjoys yelling out "They can work all day!" when I pause for him at the end of each page; it didn't take him long to work out the pattern. The brightly coloured pictures also include the people who are necessary for the machines to run, which might be good to point out to little ones who are normally too intent on fascinating vehicles to notice things as boring as people.

Bottom Line:
Dig Dig Digging is often repeating,
Pages turning, toddler grinning, vrooming and beeping,
Soon we'll be perfect at machine-like creaking,
We'll be reading all day.

Links:

Dig Dig Digging on Amazon.ca

Dig Dig Digging on Amazon.com

Review: Chicky Chicky Chook Chook

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Title: Chicky Chicky Chook Chook

Author/Illustrator: Cathy MacLennan

Publisher: Boxer Books

Year: 2007

ISBN: 978-1905417407

Format: Hardcover, also available in paperback

Pages: 32

Age Range: Toddler, Preschooler

Kid Love Factor: 4/5

Adult Sanity Factor: 1/5

Chicky Chicky Chook Chook is full of quick onomatopoeic phrases and rhymes and follows some fluffy baby chicks, furry kittens, and fuzzy bees while they peck, scatter, and buzz through the pages. The rambunctious little characters play themselves into a nap, only to be interrupted by a summer thunder storm, which quickly drenches them. Luckily, a strong breeze and some warm sun dry everyone off just in time to go to sleep.

The swirling paint colours and animated depictions of the animals hint at African influences and are well matched to the almost frenetic text. Good luck removing some of the phrases once they get lodged in your brain…

Boo loved the rhythm, the rhymes, and the repetition, and eagerly requested the story be read to him over and over again. I, on the other hand, was about ready to end myself when I saw him coming towards me with it. Don’t get me wrong: it’s a cute book and great fun for toddlers. Just don’t expect extreme gratefulness from the parental set if you gift it to their toddler. I was more than happy when it came time to return this one to the library, though I'm sure we'll be borrowing it again if Boo lays eyes on it at a future visit.

Autism Spectrum Bonus: There's not much more than what's appealing to most toddlers. The quick rhythms and rhymes may appeal to kids who crave extra auditory stimulation, and as the story is mostly nonsense, it should be just as entertaining to those who may be behind in communication as it is those who are not.  Though I must admit, now that Boo's verbal communication is stronger and he's displaying significant echolalia, I'm kinda dreading the next time we take this out from the library.

Bottom Line:

Chicky Chicky Chook Chook, toddler fun!

Chicky Chicky Chook Chook, Mommy's done!

Links : 

Chicky Chicky Chook Chook on Amazon.ca

Chicky Chicky Chook Chook on Amazon.com