Viva, Frank. Outstanding in the Rain: A Whole Story With Holes. Tundra Books, 2015.Frank Viva is an illustrator and designer, so design, rather than storyline, is the strength of this work. The illustrations are a simple, retro-modern, cartoon-like style. Viva uses a palette of five tints: blue, yellow, red, brown, and white. This gives Outstanding in the Rain a “vintage” look.This children’s picture book is a collection of oronyms, words or phrases that sound the same but have different meanings, woven into a simple story about a boy’s trip to the amusement park. For each oronym pair, Viva incorporates a die-cut hole into the text. Words from the following page are shown as part of the sentence of the page being read. When you flip the page, the die-cut reveals a different picture and the second part of the oronym is also revealed. For example, the words “night rain” in the phrase “The night rain is just beginning to fall” turn into “night train” in the text of next page, “The night train is coming-I hear its call”. The combination of die-cuts, oronyms, and rhyme is complex and clever. Even the title and subtitle, “Outstanding in the rain” and “A whole story with holes”, both include plays on words.Children will have fun playing with the words in the same way that Viva has played with them. This book would be a great tool for teachers to introduce having fun with language, specifically oronyms. Upper elementary children would have the most fun with the double meanings, but even adults would enjoy this book.Highly recommended: 4 stars out of 4Reviewer: Stephanie BorleStephanie Borle is a University of Alberta student of linguistics who enjoys working with children and new immigrants. She spent a year teaching English as a Second Language in Japan to kindergarten and junior high school students.
Kanellos, Nicolás. El Torneo De Trabalenguas = The Tongue Twister Tournament. Illustrated by Anne Vega, Arte Publico Press-Piñata Books, 2016.This is a children’s picture book that takes the form of a tongue twister competition. Each page introduces a contestant and the tongue twister (in both English and Spanish) that they are reciting in the competition. Sometimes, the translations of the tongue twisters lend themselves to very different meanings depending on the language. On the left page of each pair are the tongue-twisters. On the facing page, a surreal, cartoon-like illustration of the contestant is shown. Each illustration integrates elements of the tongue twister. The illustrations also incorporate visual jokes, especially in the shadows behind each participant. For example, Grumpy Granny, the second competitor, presents a tongue twister about a cat whose “tail was on the wrong end”. The cat in the picture has a normal tail, but the cat in the shadow has a tail on the wrong end. Forte Fortisimo, the strongman competitor reciting a tongue twister about cockroaches has a cockroach as his shadow. The book concludes with an anthology containing tongue twisters in their original languages.This is an elementary level book that would be useful for language learning, enunciation and elocution practice in both English and Spanish. The tongue twisters would be appropriate for both first and second language learners. Children can have fun trying the tongue twisters themselves, or a class could have its own tongue twister tournament. This kind of interactivity helps children be more engaged in language learning.I recommend this book for public libraries and elementary school libraries, particularly where there are Spanish speaking populations. Highly Recommended: 4 stars out of 4Reviewer: Stephanie BorleStephanie Borle is a University of Alberta student of linguistics who enjoys working with children and new immigrants. She spent a year teaching English as a Second Language in Japan to kindergarten and junior high school students.
Vickers, Roy Henry, and Robert Budd. Sockeye Silver, Saltchuck Blue. Illustrated by Roy Henry Vickers. Harbour Publishing Co. Ltd., 2019. This picture book by Indigenous artist Roy Henry Vickers and author Robert Budd, is designed to teach young children about elements of nature found on the Canadian west coast. Roy Henry Vicker’s beautiful illustrations draw the reader’s attention to the main theme of each page (e.g., whales, sea stars, sunsets, mountains, snow, the northern lights). Each page has its own colour theme and a specific colour is always mentioned (e.g., “yellow salmonberries", “purple sea stars”, “sunset red”). There are textured images allowing children to touch and feel something on every page. The book is printed on thick board pages, making it resistant to wear and tear and easier for young readers to flip through on their own. The colours and illustrations are vivid and are engaging for both children and adults. Most of the vocabulary is appropriate for younger readers, while the more difficult words serve as an opportunity to learn the names of west coast plants and animals, the names of different colours and the use of adjectives. In addition, the book has an abundance of words that start with the letter “s” which makes it a valuable resource for children who need practice producing the “s” sound. This book is recommended for teaching children, as young as two, about nature, and it should be available in school and public libraries. Highly Recommended: 4 out of 4 starsReviewer: Stephanie Borle Stephanie Borle is a University of Alberta graduate student of Speech-Language Pathology who enjoys working with adults and children. She is particularly interested in working with bilingual children and new immigrants in the area of developmental and acquired language disorders.
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