Author: Scott Gordon
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services
Rating: WORTHY!
This came a four-pack: Animal Edition, More Animals, Silly Animals, and Guess the Letter, which makes the books about a dollar each, which is a good price, but that's the ebook. Unles you have a fairly large screen to look at these on, the ebook version might be a bit dissatisfying. However I was able to read it without any difficulty on a smart phone, so it's not impossible. The drawings are really cute, and the aim is a good one - teach children the alphabet by associating each letter with an animal, then reminding them of what they've learned by repetition and testing.
I have to confess some mixed feelings about the approach here, however. I know the point is to teach the alphabet, not educate children about the animal's history or life-cycle, but some more trivia about the animals wouldn't have hurt. It would have enriched the experience by giving the children something more to dig into even after they've become familiar - and perhaps a bit bored by - the specific letter in question. There was some trivia but only a word or two. More would have been better for me.
There's also a significant preponderance of mammals in the letter-animal associations. I know that this is the common way to do this - kids, after all, love cuddly toys - but again, for me, a greater variety here would have been better. There's no reason that an alphabet primer should be restricted solely to priming kids on the alphabet! We can also employ it to start off their education in other ways, too. Multi-tasking for minors!
It’s a mistake to encourage children to view our world as populated only by organisms that are similar to us when we mammals are a tiny minority as compared with all living things. Children are going to need to realize, as they grow, what a massive interconnected web of life there is, and how important the unseen and unfamiliar is to life on Earth. There's no reason that opening young eyes to all of the wonder that awaits them shouldn't begin with an alphabet primer.
The biggest problem by far, though, is that some of the information in these books was quite simply wrong. A whale, for example, is a mammal, not a fish. A fly is indeed an insect, but it’s also an animal - part of the animal kingdom. I see no merit in misidentifying these creatures. The whale is mislabeled more than once.
There's no need to go into great detail, just simply don't wrongly identify a mammal as a fish! The biggest fish is actually a whale shark. There's no reason that couldn't have been included as one of the 'W's This same issue arose with the Koala. It was identified as a koala bear, but it’s actually not a bear, it’s just a koala (which says plenty all by itself!). A bit more consistency would have been welcome. The Zebra is correctly identified as a member of the horse family, and the dolphin isn’t misidentified as a porpoise, so there's hope!
On another issue, it’s a little harder to argue one way or the other. A lot of the letters are consistently identified with the same animal - such as 'Y' with Yak, for example. I can see the merit in this; consistency might make it easier for the child to recognize the letter, but the counter-argument is that it presets these letters to certain animals in the child's mind.
Why not work to expand that mind's perception by presenting a bit more? A child's ability to absorb information is impressive, so let’s not under-serve them. There are some minor tid-bits of information about the animals here already, and some actual photos, too, which is really nice. I just felt that there could have been more. If there's more information and they're not absorbing it so fast, then you can always read a little slower or skip a bit here and there until later.On balance, it seems to me that more variety is the better approach. How rewarding is it for a child to learn that there's even more under the surface? That things are more interesting than they might have thought? That further investigation brings more knowledge?
The author already does use more than one animal in some instances, such as identifying 'K' with both kangaroo and Koala, so it’s not completely lacking. I just kept wanting more. Maybe that's just me! Of course, there's a practical and a rational limit, too.
On the positive side, I did like the way the animals curved and curled to make the letters in one section - that's a neat way to teach the letter. I also appreciated the actual photographs, which permit children to really see what an organism looks like as opposed to being restricted to only a cartoon representation.
I'm not going to go into my pet peeve about wasting paper and excessive white space here. I tend to grant young children's books more leeway in that regard than I do adult fare. This is a children's book after all, and they may need a little help to focus on what's important. So, on balance, I favor this book. I think it does its job, but I would have liked to have seen it go the extra mile.
