Going to Sleep on the Farm - Softcover

Lewison, Wendy Cheyette

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140557431 ISBN 13: 9780140557435

Publisher: Puffin Books, 1996

Synopsis

A father describes for his son how each animal on the farm goes to sleep

About this title

From School Library Journal:

PreSchool-Grade 1-- A well-planned and well-developed book, both deceptively simple and complex. It opens with a father and young son gathering up a box of toy farm animals. The two figures are rendered in isolation against a stark white background. The boy asks his father how each of the various animals go to sleep. The father replies with a short rhyme that appears under an illustration showing first the individual creature and then a more inclusive farm scene with highly detailed backgrounds. The contrast of the bare white background with the realistic presentation of the barnyard creates a push-pull idea, a visual echo of the call/response motif set up in the text. Wijngaard's sparkling watercolors are a tour de force; he moves confidently from image to image, from the changing movements and expressions of the father and sleepy child, to authoritative paintings of the animals, all within the changing light and shadow of a waning day. Extending the story from cover painting to endpapers, these scenes make for a soothing and intriguing bedtime book. --Judith Gloyer, Milwaukee Public Library
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews:

As a drowsy little boy puts his toy animals into their box, he asks his sleepy dad (lying on the floor beside him) how they go to sleep. Dad replies in repetitive, soporific quatrains (``A pig curls up with her family or friends/Where one pig starts, another pig ends/And that's how a pig goes to sleep--Oink, oink./That's how a pig goes to sleep''). The book ends with the child snuggling into his own bed. In Wijngaard's lovely, luminous art, the relaxed poses of man and boy are wonderfully authentic. Meanwhile, the exquisitely portrayed animals are added, one by one, to a pleasant farmyard, depicted from several imaginatively chosen points of view (including the child's window), all nicely summed up in the endpapers' broader vistas of the farm at sundown and by moonlight. A captivating bedtime book, wrought with unusual thought and care. (Picture book. 2-6) -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Puffin Books
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0140557431
• ISBN 13: 9780140557435
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 32
• Illustrator: Wijngaard Juan