artemis8's Full Review: Flora McDonnell - Flora McDonnell's ABC
I recently 'discovered' Flora McDonnell and really like her artwork. She uses bold colors using gouache, acrylic, and watercolor and her illustrations are great. One of the books we found by her was Flora McDonnell's ABC.
In FM's ABC, every letter has two words both written out and illustrated. My son can say his ABCs and can recognize some of the letters, but we are still working on recognition and of course knowing the sound of the letter and seeing it used in a word will help with his learning. This book has each letter in upper and lower case in a large font.
I like a lot of the words used, and many are ones you'll see in other alphabet books, like elephant, umbrella, and ice cream. But others probably aren't as popular choices, like juggler, ladybug, and radish. And some of them I would not have chosen, like hare in particular because children will see it and think bunny or rabbit, neither of which are conducive to learning the letter h in hare. And the newt for n got a response of lizard from my son.
My son is three and he has a pretty big vocabulary, but there were definitely objects he didn't recognize. All of the words were nouns, making for much easier identification. But things like the egg that the elephant is holding didn't work well for us. He didn't recognize it as an egg. And of course even though the word egg was written on the page he didn't recognize the word either.
The illustrations are wonderful. The backgrounds are solid primary colors. The objects, many of which are animals, are accurate in their details. The flamingo has little lines along its webbed feet. The lemon has pores on its skin. And the tiger's yellow eyes compliment it's white whiskers. There is a lot of detail to every object.
The version we have of this book is a board book. It is about 6 x 5 inches. This format is great for little hands and I think this book is perfect for children from birth to 4. The older children become the more they will be into understanding the concept of the alphabet, but it never hurts to start the process when they are young and the bright colors and interesting animals will capture the attention of infants, toddlers, and preschoolers alike. I definitely recommend this fun smallish alphabet book.
This book was an American bookseller Pick of the Lists, winner of a Parents' Choice Gold Award, and a Parenting Reading Magic Award Winner.
This is an entry in msmorvay's resurrecting the oldies writeoff, as this book was written in 1997.
This is also an entry in CopeSullivan's 50 before Halloween writeoff.
An exuberant introduction to the alphabet, Flora McDonnell s ABC explodes with color, with and energy. With each letter illustrated twice--once capita...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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