Reviews
PreS-Gr 2-Two selections that are short, sweet, and delightful. The simple texts with repetitive phrases and picture clues are perfect for the youngest readers. Lascaro's colored-pencil and paper-collage illustrations in Down on the Farm are bright, bold, and thoughtfully placed on each double-page spread. An animal is shown on the left side of the page while a young girl imitates its action on the right side ("I see my duck swim. I can swim like my duck"). With a slightly longer rhyming text and the artist's familiar pen-and-ink and watercolor illustrations, McPhail's humorous book is also right on target. Big Bear is brown but soon changes color as Little Bear accidentally knocks into his ladder while he is painting a tree house blue. After cleaning up, Big Bear returns with green paint and readers are left with a giggle as the next impending disaster is suggested. In both books, the illustrations fill the pages while the text is plain and clearly set in an appropriately large font on a white background. You can't go wrong with adding several copies of these terrific books to your beginning-to-read collection.-Gale W. Sherman, Pocatello Public Library, ID, Gr. 1. In this book from the Green Light Reader series, a little girl imitates the animals and people she sees on the farm: "I see my dog play. / I can play like my dog" begins the brief narrative. Just as simple and straightforward are the collage illustrations of torn and cut papers, usually brightly colored solids lightly shaded with colored pencils. Short words, short sentences, and repetition mark this as a good choice for beginning readers, but toddlers will also respond to the simplicity of the words and pictures as well as the activities of the characters. Carolyn Phelan
