Talia’s bookshelf (updated 5 April)

Talia loves books, and we have quite a collection, many of which were gifts or bought second-hand. We also borrow books regularly from our local library.  Some books are better than others, so I thought I would share my opinions on some good books for babies and toddlers.  (Scroll down for baby books.)

Here are a few books which Talia loves now, as a 2 year old.  Some have been popular for a while, some are slightly more complex and are recent hits.

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Kipper’s Toybox - written and illustrated by Mick Inkpen
Rating: 5/5. Kipper finds a hole in his toybox, and then one of his toys goes missing… who or what can it be? This story keeps you guessing and has a great suprise ending.
Highlight: Watching my daughter pretend to be Sock Thing wriggling across the floor.

Kipper books come in a range of levels, from “touch and feel” books with minimal text to longer stories like this one, which is probably aimed more at 3 year olds.  The illustrations are beautiful and the characters are very endearing.  We also have Kipper’s Kite and Kipper’s Sticky Paws from the touch and feel series.

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Whose Tail? series- written and illustrated by Jeannette Rowe
Rating: 4/5. This is one of a series of simple flip books including Whose Ears?, Whose Nose? etc.  Each picture page shows part of an animal and you flip the page out to see who owns the ears/nose/tail/feet etc.  The last animal is a child (”my nose”, “my ears” etc)
Highlight: Fabulous bright colours - not at all realistic, but gorgeous to look at.
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The Noisy Farm - written by Marni McGee and illustrated by Leonie Shearing
Rating: 5/5. This is a slightly more advanced farm book with a lot of sound effects which your child is bound to enjoy listening to and copying.  It includes the usual animal noises but also sounds such as the squeak of bedsprings, creak of floorboards, “pong pong poink” of a bucket banging against a knee and “bubble-de-blip, bubble-de-blop” of porridge cooking in a pot.
Highlight: Lovely flowing text which goes beyond “baby language”. Also lots of mice to find throughout the book.

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Spot Visits his Grandparents - written and illustrated by Eric Hill
Rating: 5/5.  Spot the puppy dog stars in a series of ‘lift the flap’ books, and we own quite a few of them including Spot Goes to School, Spot Goes on Holidays, Spot Stays Overnight etc.  Clear pictures and simple text  with positive messages and a little bit of gentle humour.
Highlight: These books don’t say too much, so there’s always room to elaborate on what is happening if your child is in the mood.  And there are always good “oops” moments, usually involving the loss of Spot’s ball.

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Dear Zoo - written and illustrated by Rod Campbell. Board book with flaps
Rating: 5/5 I wrote to the zoo to send me a pet.  Find out what animals arrive in the post and why they are all rejected - apart from one.  Introduces words like big, tall, grumpy, fierce etc.  We’ve read it so many times that we can do it in the car from memory - with Talia filling in which animal was sent and why it was sent back.
Highlight: Sssssso they sssssssent me a ssssssssssnake…  he was too sssssscary…

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Sometimes I Like to Curl up in a Ball - written by Vicki Churchill and illustrated by Charles Fugue.
Rating: 5/5 Little Wombat enjoys a range of activities your toddler will recognise - from getting in a mess to pulling funny faces, running as fast as he can to seeing how much noise he can make.
Highlight: A slightly surreal blend of Australian and UK flora and fauna - wombats and moles, for example.

There are several other books of Little Wombat’s adventures, but this is my favourite.

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The titles below are all available as board books, and were popular with Talia from about 1-1.5 years old.  She still likes them now, but we trust her with paper pages as well these days which has expanded the number of books we can safely leave at floor level.

Hairy Maclary from Donaldson’s Dairy - written and illustrated by Lynley Dodd
Rating: 5/5. If your child likes cats and dogs, you can’t go past Hairy Maclary and his little adventures and misadventures. This book is popular with our entire family, including Talia’s grandparents.
Highlight: Wonderful characters such as Schnitzel von Krumm (with a very low tum), Bottomley Potts (covered in spots) and of course Scarface Claw (the toughest tom in town).
Lowlight: We have to read Scarface Claw’s terrifying miouw very quietly so as not to frighten our own cat, who panics if he thinks there is another cat in the room!

There are a number of books in this series. We also have Scattercat, where Hairy Maclary discovers that not all cats are for chasing.  [About 6 months after I wrote this, we have acquired about 5 more in the series!  If you can find it, the video or DVD of the books is also excellent.]

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Off We Go! - written by Jane Yolen and illustrated by Laurel Molk
Rating: 4/5. A selection of baby animals go to visit their grandma. (A good book to buy for the grandma in your child’s life). Not an obvious choice, with delicate watercolour illustrations and not a primary colour to be seen, but Talia loves it. It includes a baby snake, baby mole and a baby spider, which makes a nice change from the usual farm or zoo animals.
Highlight: “Hip-hop, hippity hop, through the slime and over the slop”
Lowlight: “Off to grandma’s house goes me”

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Faster, Faster! Nice and Slow! - written and illustrated by Sue Heap and Nick Sharratt
Rating: 5/5. A really good book of opposites, unlike some of the lame attempts I’ve seen. We borrowed this from the library and I can’t tell you how many times Talia asked me to read it - and I enjoyed reading it!
Highlight: Really well paced rhyme and lots of interesting details to point out in the pictures.
Lowlight: nothing worth mentioning!

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Baby Ways - published by the State Library of WA and distributed via Better Beginnings
Rating: 4.5/5. A lovely book of baby faces and baby activities, designed for the very youngest “readers”.
Highlight: You can sing the lyrics to the tune of “Here we go round the mulberry bush”, and of course - the mirror! My baby can’t get enough of her own reflection.
Lowlight: Only chubby babies were accepted to star in this book - none of them looked like my little prem

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Where is the Green Sheep? - written by Mem Fox, illustrated by Judy Horacek.
Rating: 5/5. This was one of Talia’s first books and an early favourite. A broad range of words including colours, opposites and common objects. Clear illustrations.
Highlight: humorous details in the illustrations eg the star sheep is taking a bow, and the rain sheep is swinging from a lamp-post as per the famous scene in “Singing in the Rain”
Lowlight: since when did “fat” become “wide”?

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Moo, Baa, La La La - written and illustrated by Sandra Boynton.
Rating: 4.5/5 Another early favourite, and the first book I learned off by heart. Fun animal noises.
Highlight: Three singing pigs say la la la! (Which we sing to the tune of “who’s afraid of the big bad wolf” )
Lowlight: no story line as such

Other books we have from this series include Opposites, Doggies (counting and barking), Horns to Toes and in Between (parts of the body), The Going to Bed Book and our personal favourite But Not the Hippopotamus (about a hippo who is shy and misses out until invited to join in by the other animals. )

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That’s not my dinosaur/reindeer/ penguin/…. - written by Fiona Watt and illustrated by Rachel Wells. Board books with textures.
Rating: 4/5 Bright colours, a range of textures. Cute concept, but mum and dad got bored pretty quickly. Some are definitely better than others, so browse before you buy.
Highlight: The day Talia realised there was a little mouse on every page, and got all excited pointing them out to me
Lowlight: Formulaic. By the time you’ve seen 3, you’ve pretty much seen them all. On the plus side, you can easily adapt the formula yourself. We were flying to Sydney and I was reading Talia the in-flight safety brochure. “That’s not my aeroplane, it’s emergency escape slides are too slippery!”

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The Very Hungry Caterpillar - written and illustrated by Eric Carle.
Rating: 5/5 This classic introduces counting, days of the week, various types of food, simple cause and effect and the life cycle of a butterfly. I’m expecting to be able to read it to her for years and she’ll get more out of it as time goes on.
Highlight: Talia loves putting her finger in the holes, and also loves the great “pop” sound we make with our mouth as the caterpillar hatches out of the egg.
Lowlight: The butterfly’s wings are upside down, which always looks so wrong!

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Oh Dear! - written and illustrated by Rod Campbell. Board book with flaps
Rating: 5/5 Buster goes to every animal on the farm looking for eggs. Great chance to practice all your farm animal noises
Highlight: We put in Talia’s name “so Talia went to the barn and asked the…” and change a few words eg hen house to chook yard. She loves looking under the flaps.
Lowlight: One day she’ll realise Nana (who does have a chook yard with chooks) doesn’t really have all those other animals at her house.

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