At Home (My First Word Book)

A family of rabbits takes young readers through different rooms of a house to name familiar objects

PreSchool-- Two oversized books with busy Richard Scarry-like illustrations featuring everyday family activities. Each double-page spread of At Home shows a specific room in which a rabbit family interacts. Objects in the pictures are labeled or mentioned in conjunction with concepts such as safety or opposites. Seasons follows a fox family throughout the year at home, at the beach, and in the park. While the books claim to teach larger concepts such as growth, changes in nature, discovering new things, and the value of doing chores, many of these lessons will not be easily discernible to the intended audience. The text features simple words and sentences that could encourage beginning readers, but the board-book format may not be acceptable to them. The density of words, concepts, story lines and activities throughout these titles makes them unfocused and overwhelmingly complex for toddlers. My First Look at Seasons and My First Look at Home (both Random, 1990) are more suitable selections. --Marge Loch-Wouters, Menasha Public Library, WI
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Featuring an animal family engaged in a variety of activities, each of these large-format volumes in the My First Word Book series contains five spreads on which objects and actions are labeled. The more inventive At Home occasionally groups words thematically; one spread illustrates several examples of the use of "please" and "thank you," and another spotlights prepositions ("Teddy is on the bed"). Curiously, Seasons --in which a wolf family is pictured in four seasonal settings--contains no such word groupings. In both volumes, six panels at the top of the spreads relate stories that are often pointless. More useful are the safety tips sprinkled throughout the pages ("Don't touch the plug!"). Though kids will appreciate the appealingly crowded, brightly hued illustrations--and though parents will be grateful for the books' sturdy pages--these titles lack the inherent humor and zip of other first word books, notably Richard Scarry's classics. Ages 2-6.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.