Bryan_Carey's Full Review: Rosemary Wells - Max's ABC
Learning the letters of the alphabet and their respective sounds is a basic skill that all young children must master. Many learning tools exist for this purpose but the most common among them is reading and one book that helps kids learn their alphabet is Max's ABC, a book featuring the Nickelodeon characters, Max and Ruby.
Book Contents:
Max has an ant farm, but one day the ants escape from the farm. They climb up Max's pants and head for Max's birthday cake. Max pours his cup of cranberry juice on the ants and watches it pour down his pants while the ants drink it up.
Max's sister Ruby steps in to help take care of the problem. She insists Max remove his pants and take a bath, which he did. Max is cleaned up, but the ant problem persists until Ruby finally gets the idea to suck them up in the vacuum cleaner. Max takes the bag from the vacuum cleaner and shakes out the ants, who then return to their ant farm to get some sleep.
Final Thoughts: Max ABC is a book intended to help children learn the letters of the alphabet and it accomplishes this through example and repetition. This book is a large, hardcover volume and it includes a page for each letter of the alphabet, complete with one to three words that feature the spotlighted letter along with boldface text on the spotlighted letter, to help children recognize it. The featured letter is also drawn in the top corner of each page, for easy reference.
Max and Ruby is not one of my favorite cartoons, but my both of my girls love it and knowing how much they like the cartoon, I correctly assumed they would take to this book right away and possibly learn more about the alphabet in the process. The fact that Max and Ruby are the featured characters guaranteed they would approach this book with curiosity, which they did. They turned the pages and read the letters while also pointing out the pictures and actions corresponding to each letter.
Max's ABC is a little different from what I would expect in this type of book. It is common for books like this to attempt to teach the alphabet with examples of words, but what sets this book apart is the way it tells a story as it teaches. The story is a little weird, but it almost has to be this way in order for the words of the story to match up with the highlighted letter. "A" is, of course, the first letter of the alphabet so the first page of the book mentions ants. The next page talks about the ants heading for the birthday cake and taking bites. The story continues in this manner until the final page, when the ants make it back to the ant farm to catch some zzzzzz's.
The illustrations in this book are good and they are drawn to appear like cartoon characters, and this makes perfect sense considering the two characters, Max and Ruby, are part of a television cartoon. Each illustration is contained within a square in the middle of the page. The rest of the pages feature a solid color, the words of the story, and the featured letter. The illustrations are nothing incredible, but the point is to highlight the chosen letter with specific words, so the illustrations succeed in that regard.
Overall, Max's ABC is a good children's book with some solid educational value. The story is a little odd, but the author did a good job completing a story that follows the letters of the alphabet in chronological order. I'm not fond of the Max and Ruby cartoon, but I like this book and so do my two girls, making it a book that earns an easy recommendation.
Everybody s favorite bunnies star in their very own ABC concept book that teaches the alphabet by featuring a different letter on each page. Full colo...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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