Alphabet Week -- 5 Days of Great Alphabet Books, Day 5

Since the holidays will be upon us before we know it, I wanted to include an alphabet book that is a special favorite at our house. We use it around Christmastime not really to learn our letters, but to recount the story of Jesus' birth. If you've been reading all week, you'll know that I am biased toward alphabet books that tell a story so that the letter-learning is embedded in some context. Also, I am a sucker for beautiful artwork. B is for Bethlehem, by Isabel Wilner, has both.


The story of the nativity is told in rhyme, each rhyme beginning with a letter of the alphabet. It's a lucid and lovely retelling of the Christmas story -- perhaps not the one you'd want your kids to hear if it's their first time hearing it, but more than adequate for children who are familiar with the biblical account.


The pictures, by Elisa Kleven, are pure joy -- mixed media collage and drawing in vibrant colors that really bring the story to life. Like Steve Jenkins, I don't know anyone else who does collage quite like Kleven does. Her style is unique and gorgeous. These are pictures that I and my kids never get tired of looking at.

It's been around for a while -- long enough to be out in boardbook format -- but if you can track down a hardcover it would be worth it for the larger picture size and the durability. Especially if you, like me, want it to last for many Christmases to come.

Alphabet Week -- 5 Days of Great Alphabet Books, Day 4

This post is a bit of a cheat because I'm not going to talk about a single book. Rather, I'm going to talk about a category of books called Special Interest Alphabet Books (SAIB): books built entirely around a particular area in which your child has a marked interest. And yes, I just made that up.

This particular book, The Beetle Alphabet Book by Jerry Pallota, is a great, and at our house much-loved, example of this genre. The entire book is devoted to beetles. If you have a bug lover at your house, this is the book for you. Pallota's books are for older kids, 4 years and up. Even my 8 year old occasionally picks this one up because it's loaded with interesting factual information about beetles -- beetle characteristics, weird stuff beetles do, exotic beetles -- it reads like a children's encyclopedia. Because it's so rich with information, my children come back to it again and again. It was an excellent tool for my son's kindergarten year to reinforce letter and sound recognition and it was the hands-down choice for Bring Your Favorite Book To School Day.

Pallotta is probably the king of this kind of book. By my very unscientific count, he's got something like 21 different alphabet books, all highly specific. Here's an example from the text of The Construction Aphabet Book:

The subjects he covers range from airplanes (2 books) to boats to flowers. Vegetables, furry animals, birds, reptiles, the desert, frogs, dinosuars, the ocean, even skulls and extinct animals have their own books. You can visit his website for a complete list of books (he does some neat stuff with math concepts, too).

Two warnings about Pallotta's books: he uses different illustrators for each volume, so the quality of the artwork can sometimes be uneven. The Beetle Alphabet Book has gorgeous pictures, but The Yucky Reptile Alphabet Book has a couple pictures which are dark and make it hard to pick out detail. For this reason, it might be better to go to the bookstore or library and see what you're getting. Also, on occasion he chooses something to represent a letter which doesn't make that letter's sound. This happens twice in The Yucky Reptile Alphabet Book: once with Knob-Tailed Gecko (which he notes is a silent K and adds Komodo Dragon to rectify) and again with Gila Monster for G. If you grew up in the Southwest, as I did, you know that Gila is pronounced "hee-lah." Not at all an English G sound.

Beyond Pallotta, there are any number of other SIABs out there.

There's this one, above, for the dancer in the family. And this one, below, for the dog lover.

W is for Woof is part of a series of SAIBs, which are shown below. It covers some unsual interests, like travel and camping, along with more common interests like cats and horses.

The point of all this is that children always learn more when that learning is embedded in something they're already interested in. It's more than worth the time to seek out alphabet books that will build on that interest.

All images from Amazon.com or BarnesandNoble.com

Alphabet Week -- 5 Days of Great Alphabet Books, Day 3

This is one of our favorite alphabet books. What sets it apart from other alphabet books is the stunning quality of its artwork. The rhyming text detailing all sorts of beautiful and exotic sea life also makes it worth adding to your home collection.

The pictures are all by Steven Jenkins, collage artist extrordinaire. Every time I read this book, I am struck again by the beautiful layers of torn and cut paper that make up the pictures. There just isn't anyone who does collage art like Jenkins.


The rhyming text, by Deborah Lee Rose, will introduce kids to all manner of interesting ocean life -- anemones, grey whales, dolphins, manatees, jellies, narwhals, umbrellamouths and viperfish and my favorite page, zooplankton. There's a nice balance between animals children will know (crabs, penguins, octopus) and those that will probably be new (narwhals, zooplankton, umbrellamouths). There's also a nice correspondance between the letters represented and their beginning sounds. For the letters W and X, "...blue Whales eXhale..."; maybe not the first letter of the word, but certainly a better representation of the sound X makes than the all-too-common "xylophone."

At the back of the book, as with all Jenkins books, there's a section with extra information about all the animals in the book. Excellent for older kids who are interested in ocean critters, or to incorporate this book into a larger unit about ocean life.

This book is out in paperback, but I think it's worth tracking down in hardcover; if your kids are anything like mine, this book's going to get a lot of repeat use.

All pictures via BarnesandNoble.com

Alphabet Week -- 5 Days of Great Alphabet Books, Day 2

Here's an alphabet book that actually tells a story. Letters thrown at the reader with nothing to ground them just don't "stick" the way letters embedded in a story do. For this reason, I've always favored story-based alphabet books over those which are more random. Like The Alphabet Book, by PD Eastman -- reeeaallllly not a fave.



Kipper's A to Z; An Alphabet Adventure has lovely watercolor pictures, engaging and mostly familiar characters, and an actual story that gives the alphabet some context. Kipper and his friend Pig are looking for animals...first they find an Ant, which they put in a Box, then a Caterpillar...and so on through the alphabet. There's a Zebra, the quintessential Z animal, who keeps showing up at the wrong time, giving kids the opportunity to set him straight. It's a nice little ramble through the alphabet and it shows both upper and lowercase letters, which may be helpful to older kids.

If you're looking for something to introduce the alphabet, particularly to younger children, this is a good choice because of the coherent story. It probably won't fly with older (like Kindergarten) kids, but for the preschool and toddler crowd it's a good one.

Alphabet Week -- 5 Days of Great Alphabet Books, Day 1

I used to really loathe alphabet books. Generally, they're harder to read than other picture books, and seldom do they have anything that really passes for a story. Often they're just random words that happen to begin with the appropriate letter. However, there have been a few, a very few, that were really head and shoulders above the crowd. One of these is I Spy Little Letters.

Many kids have enjoyed the I Spy series and its sister books, the Little I Spy board books and early readers. This is a board book that is especially good not just for learning the alphabet, but for teaching letter recognition.

If you have a 3, 4 or 5 year old who is beginning to recognize specific letters, this is a great resource. All the text is in riddle form, with clues about the letters that children can then solve by identifying the correct letter: "I spy letters/On a big red A" and the A is red and covered with letters. As the child identifies it, she reinforces her understanding of what an uppercase A should look like. All the letters have some clearly distinguishing (and alphabetic) feature -- S might be covered with sand, G with glitter, B with balloons, and so on.

Most importantly, the letters in this board book are LARGE -- a good 1.5-2 inches tall by my measure. This makes it much easier for little eyes to perceive the differences in shapes. The photography, like all the little I Spy books, is bright and clear and appealing to kids and the riddles make a game out of learning to recognize letters. Rather than just throwing letters and words at them and hoping they'll assimilate the information, this book gets them to interact with the text, increasing the chances that they'll remember what they've read and transfer it to other situations.

It's a great choice for preschool-aged kids.