Wednesday, March 5, 2008

Neighborhood Mother Goose

Crews, Nina. 2004. THE NEIGHBORHOOD MOTHER GOOSE. Greenwillow Books.

THE NEIGHBORHOOD MOTHER GOOSE contains a collection of forty-one traditional “Mother Goose” rhymes. An alphabetical index to the rhyme’s titles is located at the front of the book to assist the reader in locating specific rhymes more easily. Crews uses colored photographs to illustrate the various rhymes, which will help the younger children to understand words and phrases with which they might not be familiar. An example of this can be found in the rhymes: “Ride a Cockhorse” contains a photograph of a boy and a woman riding on horses in a merry-go-round, a term and item that many would recognize before the terms cockhorse and “A was An apple pie” shows each of the action terms listed from A to Z (ex. longed for, took it, or upset it) performed by various children using a pie as a prop. Crews does a great job of incorporating people from many different ethnicities and cultures to appeal to a larger, more diverse audience, causing a feeling of pride as their culture is represented in the book. Children will be mesmerized by the pictures and the flow of the rhymes begs to be chanted or sung aloud. However, by using photographs of actual people, the illustrations will quickly become dated as fashion and times change.

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