Review: Look Right, Look Left, Look Right Again! (board book)

It was so fun to review this new book from Greene Bark Press, Inc.: Look Left, Look Right, Look Left Again, which is written for ages 3-8 and sells for $8.50.

This 26 page board book by Ginger Pate is well illustrated by Rhett Pennell. The colorful illustrations tell of a little boy duck, Wally Waddlewater, and of the card he wants to mail to his grandmother. Each two page spread tells a part of his journey to the post-office. The word counts per page range from 26 to more than 60. Wally encounters cars, trucks, buses, stop lights, trains, and even an elephant... as he learns to look left,  right, and left again, and be sure nothing is in sight. All the while Wally's mother is along to keep him safe and teach him. At the end of the book he finally crosses the street alone and makes a visit to his grandma.

How we used this:
We live in the country, but our road has very high speed traffic with low visibility. I rarely allow my two youngest to go to the mailbox alone. This book gave us a good opportunity to talk about proper safety when approaching a roadway, and a little repeated phrase that has really stuck in their heads. My kids are 5 and 7 though, and a bit old for board books. I also read this book to my nephew, who is one and a half years old. He LOVES board books and loved the colorful illustrations. He said "quack quack" every time he saw Wally. But, the pages had too many words to get the point across and he lost interest in each page long before I was finished reading it. It's possible that a 3 or 4 year old might do better with it, but even my bigger kids found it too wordy. The pages could have been much more concisely phrased, even with the repeated line:

"Look left, Look right, Look left again."

As a side note: My sister recently returned from a trip to Scotland, and she pointed out to me that if you live anywhere besides the USA, you might want to reverse the title of this book to "Look Right, Look Left, Look Right Again." Hehehe!

 Be sure to read all the other reviews of this book over on the crew blog:


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