Skip to main content

enjoying board books: 5 of the best

I've been having a clear out, getting rid of stuff we no longer need now the little girl is nearly four.

One of the things that has gone is lots of board books.  You know, all the 'That's not my...' books, the cute animal books with fluffy bits and so on.  We're left with only five, and they've survived the cull because they're pure dead brilliant.

I thought I'd tell you about them in case you were looking for a present for a baby or toddler that will be appreciated by the whole family.

The books are in no particular order, and most of them can be bought in several formats.  You may well have come across them already, but if not do check them out.

The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle

A fantastically simple and colourful book which is so old that I remember it from my own childhood.  The Very Hungry Caterpillar has different sizes of pages, which help children to understand about numbers, and it also teaches days of the week and healthy eating.  All this with fabulous illustrations which have now spawned lots of merchandise.

Dear Zoo by Rod Campbell

A nice lift-the-flap book, with a simple repetitive theme, encouraging participation in the story.  This is one of those books you will hear very little children reading to themselves.  And it's always fun trying to guess why the animal sent was no good.

Personally I'm not convinced by the ending.  I'd have kept the frog.

Argh Spider! by Lydia Monks

I think Lydia Monks might be my favourite illustrator.  She's done a few books with Julia Donaldson you might have come across as well (eg Sharing a Shell).  This book has the fabulous refrain 'Argh! Spider! Out you go!', and is a heart warming tale of a family changing their mind about a spider when they realise how cool she is (until she pushes her luck too far).

It's well written, has fabulous, colourful illustrations, and its also got glitter!

 How Big is a Pig?  by Clare Beaton

I'm not sure if we ever truly discover how big a pig is, but once again, this book has amazing illustrations (I would love to see the original work, the detail is extraordinary).  It's a lovely rhyming book which takes us through a farm full of animals exploring opposites.

This book deserves to be much better known than it is.

Each Peach Pear Plum by Janet and Allan Ahlberg

I love this book, there are lots of things to spot, and it uses traditional tales, so you know all the characters, but they're outside the realms of their own stories, which I find completely delightful.

I think my favourite bit is where they all come together for a picnic at the end.  There is so much going on in that picture that it sparks more ideas.  We love spotting things in this story.

What are your favourite board books?

Other posts you might like:
The book challenge
Words at 3/6/14 - 82,500.  
43,000 words done since the challenge began, 11,500 last month.
Where I'm at in First Draft - Chapter 20.
What I did last - the heroine having breakfast with her Mum.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

February update!

  Hello! Please see above for a screenshot (not sure who the photo is by) from the lovely Fragmented Voices website which has my poem, Escaping Pheasants, as their featured poem today. This poem is inspired by the pheasants which are brought in to our local country house for people who are that way inclined to shoot. Sometimes I see them flapping down from the estate wall and on to the busy road, making a break for it toward the moors. Good luck pheasants. Escaping Pheasants also features in my book, Little Gods, published by the marvellous Roswell Publishing and available from booksellers and Amazon, or get in touch to get a signed copy from me. Other recent successes include two poems in Obsessed with Pipework #105, a Haiku in Coin Operated Press ' Haiku Zine, The Libraries  came out in Culture Matters' Bread & Roses Anthology, and, as I mentioned last time, When you slow a bit you can see the way , another poem from Little Gods, came out in Butcher's Dog #19. I have ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Happy New Year!

I can still wish you happy new year before January's out, right? Having spending a while doing research and convincing myself I can't write, I'm back in the room in 2019, sending my little baby poems out into the world. I have broken up the chapbook I was trying to get published, I've rewritten lots of stuff, and I'm happily sending them out to places where I hope they might find a happy home, while supporting some of the fantastic poetry magazines out there. One of those fantastic poetry magazines - Picaroon Poetry  - run by the marvellous Kate Garrett - has already accepted one of my babies. It was one of the ones that I'd started to feel bored by, so I tore it to bits, rewrote it, and sent it off to Kate, who will be sending it out into the world in Picaroon Poetry #16 in May (which is terribly organised if you ask me, I don't even know what I'm doing tomorrow!). Thanks Kate!  Hopefully I'll be letting you all know about more successes soo...
2 comments
Read more

discovering Iain Crichton Smith

I think I don't like poetry. In fact I'm pretty sure. What I like is a brick of a book with well rounded characters, who can take me on a journey with them. I find that for me poetry can be navel gazing, twee nonsense, so caught up in its clever cleverness that it drives me to distraction. But then again, I like lots of songs for their lyrics, and sometimes, just sometimes, I come across some poetry which just blows me away. I came across Iain Crichton Smith recently at my writing group. I live in Scotland, and the other members of the group were all saying that Smith is so much covered in Scottish English (and Gaelic) classes that people don't tend to notice the beauty of his poetry. I didn't go to school in Scotland. The poets I studied at school were people like Wordsworth, Shakespeare, Shelley. I don't recall ever coming across anything like this. That said, I'm not sure that as a teenager I would have noticed it. Perhaps you have to have some i...
1 comment
Read more