jander01's Full Review: Matthew Van Fleet - Alphabet
My son loves animals (almost as much as trucks). We have a membership to both the area zoo and aquarium and have spent countless number of hours watching and admiring the animals. So whenever I skim the books at Barnes and Noble, I always take note of the new animal selections and a familiar cover caught my eye.
ALPHABET by Matthew Van Fleet follows the visual and written style of his successful line of childrens books, which including the toddler crowd pleasers DOGS and TAILS. If youve read Van Fleets previous books, you know that his interactive style of writing is infectious and fun. His multi-dimensional approach to education gives children fuzzy textures to feel, colorful cartoon-like pictures to admire, and even a scratch and sniff tab. The simple rhymes of the text also demonstrate synonyms, antonyms, and action words while introducing your child to the A to Z world of wonderful and exotic animals, insects and plants.
This is one of the few books that keeps my sons attention without my participation. I keep our copy in my car because my son loves to flip through the pages himself and recite his ABCs with each fun-filled page. Now that he recognizes his letters, we also use it for a silly game of spell the animal/word. He thinks its hilarious that he can give me a few letters and Mommy knows what animal he is looking at. The love of words and books begins.
As a parent, I appreciate the effort and work put into making this an enjoyable and educational book for the pre-school crowd. ALPHABET will definitely challenge your animal vocabulary. Do you know what an Uacaris or a Tamarin is? How about a Junco or Drill? Oh and I can keep going. Zorilla, Xenops, or Numbat anybody??? Lets just say that I had to perform a few quick Google searches to prepare myself for the anticipated rounds of Mommy what is that? before my first read. I can only imagine the amount of research involved in finding the animals for this book. It makes me feel a little better to know that he was a biology major in college (Ohh but I was too, UGHHH). I love that its not only educational for my son but, tests mommys knowledge too.
The book also includes a pull out poster that reinforces the things that you learned in the book with additional tabs and drawings. Though a great addition to the book, I wish that it was made a little sturdier. Ours is already on its last legs.
Another great book by Van Fleet. Definitely worth buying.
Alphabet written and illustrated by Matthew Van Fleet.
Published by the Paula Weisman Books Series, an imprint of Simon and Schuster Publishing.
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