Languages Books

Definitely Scarry's best work and one of the few books I vividly remember from my childhood. It is a great introduction to geography and world cultures. At 3, my son was able to identify shapes of countries, flags and traditional clothing from around the world.

Very fun anthology of numerous 2-page stories from around the world. Charming detailed pictures, culturally relevant backdrops.

Publishers: Please renew licenses for this and reprint it! I've bought "busy, busy town" and "mother goose" as gifts only because this one is out of print.

Wow! I can't belive this book is not in print. I loved it as a kid and was hoping to get one for my new baby. My sisters and I loved reading this stories. It's too bad we don't have our old copy. Publishers, please bring this book back!!

This is my Favorite book from when I was a child. I still have my torn up copy at home and when I feel really sick I make my Dad read it to me.

Still reading my childhood copy to my 3 kids. The 10 year old, all full of attitude and desire for adult fare, just said the other day, "That's still one of my favorite books." The 4 year old could read it every night.

Amazingly, I don't remember knowing who Couscous was in the street scene until reading it to them and noticing the clue in the next scene.

I have an original copy of this book, which my children, esp. the youngest, LOVED. His daughter is turning one year old and they've asked everyone to pick out a favorite book for a gift (as they are inundated w/more clothes, toys, etc. than they will ever need).
His wife asked him if he had a favorite book as a child, and this was it!
Despite it's being read SO many times, it's in really good condition and is the 1965 edition, which I now know is long out of print.
So, this will be a gift for her from grandma & grandpa... though she likely won't handle it herself for a while!

This book is perfect for the Halloween season, although it does not mention Halloween specificially. Because of this, I was able to read it to my son's school class for the "fall" season (his school tries not to focus on the Halloween holiday). The kids loved it. The main character is a friendly witch who gets out of a sticky situation thanks to the friends she has made along the way. A fun read.

My 2.5 year old daughter and I love this book! Although we skip the page with the dragon, the illustrations, rhyming and story make it fun!
My daughter loves the animals and loves to quote the book. Great reading for all ages.

As a Calif kindergarten teacher and mother of a 3 year old, I love this book. The story is engaging and witty; I find that I'm the one pulling out the book night after night (which also thrills my little one!). As a teacher, I love the rhymes (a challenging concept for my students in the first two months of school) and the predictable pattern keeps the children engaged and thinking about what comes next.

My 3 year old grandson loves this book. Nice art work and a good story. I think this book would be a great addition to any child's library. I was extremely pleased with the book we love reading this together. I hope I can find other nice books like this for him. His mother loved Witches Holiday by Alice Lowe when she was little and I think this is a equal.

This book is just great, entertaining, educating, fun reading and listening. It's a book about building friendship. I'll definitely buy more of her books. (I have a feeling my son will like "The Snail and The Whale" and "Where's My Mom?":) ) The only other book my son loved this much was "Hello! Is This Grandma?" by Ian Whybrow and Deborah Allwrigh but I think I love reading this one better due to the rhymes in it :)

"Only as Good as Your Word" is a witty and engaging account of one writer's ability to make a career for herself doing the thing she loves most. Shapiro tells the story of her successes and stumbles with humor and humility, while sharing sage advice of her own and words of wisdom from the mentors who guided her along the way. "Plumbers don't have plumbing blocks," said her cousin, the writer Howard Fast -words anyone who has frozen at the sight of a blank page would do well to remember. Shapiro's insights are helpful, entertaining and inspiring. One can't help but admire her perserverance and appauld the success she has achieved. "Only as Good as Your Word" is a great read.

The adventures of making it as a professional writer - it's more than an endless stack of rejection slips. "Only As Good As Your Word: Writing Lessons from My Favorite Literary Gurus" is author Susan Shapiro's memoir of her life trying to make it with her pastime of writing. Focusing on the wisdom imparted on her from her countless mentors over the years, it serves as an excellent source in itself for writers and aspiring writers. "Only As Good As Your Word: Writing Lessons from My Favorite Literary Gurus" is highly recommended to community library memoir collections.

Susan Shapiro brings the same lively, smart, hilarious prose to the history of her writing life as she brought to her sex/love life in Five Men Who Broke My Heart. Who would have thought this book could be just as compelling and entertaining? In writing about her mentors, Shapiro is full of priceless advice about writing--and about living in general. She was a girl who never gave up, who fought hard and worked hard and listened and learned when older and wiser writers spoke. Most of us would do well to read this book with as much attention.

Susan Shapiro's memoir sparkles with humor and insight that any writer could put to good use. Every chapter chronicles her courtship of and relationship with a different literary mentor, each of whom she psychoanalyzes into a substitute familial role - the emotionally available father, the kind older brother, the intellectually-minded maternal figure. What makes this work is Shapiro's endearing candor about her analytical bent, and the way it shapes the narrative into a cohesive whole.

As Shapiro navigates the rocky world of the NYC literary scene, she never hesitates to admit her own mistakes and point out the pitfalls to her readers. The stories are engaging and poignant, and most importantly, they demonstrate that mentors are cultivated in all the expected places in unexpected ways. This book is a useful and entertaining choice for anyone curious about the New York publishing world, and an invaluable resource for those who want to become a part of it.

Shapiro's "Only as Good as Your Word" is an informative, well-written, humorous and heartening book that should be mandatory reading for any aspiring writer. The mentor-protégé relationship plays such a crucial role in the literary/journalism world--which is why the author's no-holes-barred insight on its highs, lows, psychological underpinnings and ramifications as they relate to her are breathtaking. She pulls no punches when it comes to indicting her own neurotic behavior--and in doing so deconstructs the myth that having it all means having it all together. That Shapiro does it with such seemingly effortless yet loaded prose makes for quite the feat; her poetry training has obviously served her well.

If you've ever, had, been or needed a mentor, this book is for you.

My copy is dog-eared. You can get the book online; I still prefer dead trees in hand.

You can read the table of contents and get a feel for the book. But what is best is Greenspun's attitude.

I think his best comment is that the hard part is the design and the easy part is to "Write a couple of programs that parse the HTML forms and turn them into actual database transactions". (pg 172) And then he provides examples of doing just this.

But as I said, Greenspun has an attitude that is very refreshing.

Easily the most readible treatise on DB weblishing that I've seen, Greenspun's book covers all the bases without descending too far into geek speak.

Your VP will understand it, and your MIS manager will be able to use it for something.

Some of the specific technology described in this book is a little outdated now, but the core techniques live on.

Greenspun's writing is a delight to read, and the information he shares here will provide you with the foundational knowledge on which to build a wide variety of web applications.

Buy this book (or read the online version at philip.greenspun.com), follow the examples, and start building yourself (and others) great, content-filled, easy-to-use web sites.

Philip Greenspun is a rare find: a techie who knows how to communicate. He doesn't even limit himself to one media! While other books may take a schlolarly approach to building websites, Greenspun's story is told by someone who's rolled up his sleeves. As the reader, you get to view web-database design through Greenspun's eye for detail. All tech books should be this good.

This book focuses on the goals of Web site design rather than the nuts and bolts. Although the book contains specific code fragments, it is not a coding book. Rather it is a chronicle of Greenspun's experiences in setting up more than 50 Web sites over the years. This chronicle contains many hard-won lessons that will help prevent the reader from making similar mistakes.

Greenspun has an easy-to-read writing style and a wry sense of humor. (The book has no CD ROM attached to the inside back cover but a picture of a CD ROM with the international "No" symbol overprinted. All code an more is available from Greenspun's Web sites, as you would expect from a book about Web sites.) He also emphasizes esthetic choices and subscribes to a minimalist visual style, in the book and for Web sites, that enhance reading and make downloads as fast as possible.

Lynda Weinman knows what she is talking about. I have learned quite a bit following her lead.

I highly recommend this book. It was an excellent learning tool for me as a beginner. The tutorials were fabulous!

To tell you the truth, I had no clue how to use Dreamweaver when I first installed the software until I purchase this book. I have build websites starting off with using the NOTEBPAD friend. So I knew some HTML codes already. But, this book helped me a lot in understanding what exactly Dreamweaver does. I love the exercises that she had to offer in every chapter. This book gave illustrations and exercises to help you understand Dreamweaver easier. I like how she made it easy to learn and understand at the same time. It was not boring at all compared to other books that only has texts. I would recommend this book to anybody because it helped me a lot in understanding Dreamweaver!

I enjoyed the exercises and layout of the book. For someone who never did any web development this book is great.

I must say that Lynda is, hands down, the best instructor I've ever come across on the printed page. I've been using Dreamweaver for over two years and I learned so much from this book. The chapters and exercises were so concise, so ordered and really a lot of fun. I recommend this book whole-heartedly!

I loved this one growing up. Really. Amelia Bedelia always choose the funniest possible interpretation of words, and her name rhymes! What's not to love?

The one thing I'd be concerned about is that a lot of the usages in this book are going to be unfamiliar to your young kid. I don't think many of us say "draw the curtains" anymore, and even if we do, we probably don't often talk about "trimming" steak (with or without lace!) or "dressing" chicken, at least, not around our kids. Maybe we should, but we don't.

So this book might be better saved for read-aloud time than read-alone time.

My first grader love that book. He was cracking up and he had so much fun reading this book! He reads it without any help. It is a cute and funny story and if you child doesn't like to read this is a great book to spike an interest in reading.

I remember reading these books years and years ago! I'm in 10th grade and it's been more 5 years since I was in elementary school and yet when I go work at my old school I go back and read them again!

A fun (and funny) book which will delight kids with Amelia's well-intentioned but mistake-laden chores. Kids feel empowered because they are 'smarter' than the character and are able to cheer her on. In the end, Amelia's good deeds overpower any mistakes she makes.

I recommend this book for any child who is beginning to read on their own!

This is surly a kids favorite since I was a little girl! We join Amelia Bedelia as she starts her first day of work for the Rodgers. They rush off shortly after she arrives, but they've left her a list of things to do. Should be a snap, as all the tasks are simple and clearly stated...but that's what you think...Amelia Bedelia begins completing each chore in quite a literal fashion...drawing the drapes and much, much more! Younger kids (1-4) will like the silliness of it and beginner readers and more savvy grade schoolers (5-8) will like that's it's simple and clever/silly too! I recommend it without reservation! I'm sure Amelia will be with us, teaching fine lessons about the words we use and the many means they can have for generations to come!

This books contains chapters on: ABCs, Phonics, Spelling and Vocabulary, 123s, Shapes and Colors, Patterns, Matching and sorting, Time and Money, Community, Science, Fun and Games.

Depending on how advanced your child is in certain areas they might say "easy-peasy" like mine. But even in those chapters are mazes, coloring areas while they reinforce their existing skills.

I think the community, pattern and money sections look interesting to me since I've not bought any other books that had these work areas. My daughter also loves science and there is a nice section in their as well.

So far she has taken to the book nicely and hasn't complained that anything was "booorrring".

The pages are also removable!

I picked this up for my Daughter, who is in Kindergarten, and she LOVES it! We have to, literally, tear her away from this book to get her to eat dinner or take a bath.....It's been a big help in teaching her to tell time and how to correctly write her letters (S and J in particular!), she loves the matching and counting games, and she's obsessed with the mazes. She's had the book for a little less than a week, and she's only about halfway through.....It's a MASSIVE book! She's already asking for the First Grade book next.......Highly recommended.

A nice little book to have for your toddler just learning to read. There are lots of easy activities, simple puzzles, mazes, matching exercises, and other games to support your little one as they are learning to read and deal with simple arithmetic. My four-year-old, not normally inclined to sit with a worksheet, enjoys these.

The pages and things to do are in small, bite-sized (and age appropriate) chunks to keep it fresh for the next time.

A nice touch is that the pages are in color, and can be easily reproduced in a color printer.

The Brain Quest Workbook: Kindergarten is a large collection of activities geared toward the 5-6 year old set.

The workbook is in sections, with a table of contents at the beginning and each section is color coded, and each page is numbered.

The sections and subject matter cover ABCs, Phonics, Spelling and Vocabulary, 123s, Shapes and Colors, Patterns, Matching and Sorting, Time and Money, Community, Science, Fun and Games, and there are Brain Quest Extras- stickers, a mini-card deck (you cut it out), and a fold out "ticktock clock" poster.

The book is well made, much nicer than the "homework" phonics workbook my pre-k student was given at school. The difference is that the BrainQuest book covers more areas and is more engrossing and practical than the school provided workbooks which seem to base their whole method on repetition rather than learning by doing/practical experience...

The pages are colorful and friendly...No distracting brand name characters here...The illustrations are quite nice, not necessary, but they definitely bring a warm, happy spirit to the workbook and a happy mood when doing work can make the difference between success and a book like this becoming a door stop...

The pages are perforated. This is a great feature if you are on the go and just want to grab a few pages as kid busy work in waiting rooms, stuck in traffic, on an airplane, or at a restaurant.

The one downside I have found is that some workbook activities are not just one page, this means that you can't just rip out one page without taking 1/2 of another activity with you... I hope that Brain Quest prints many more of these but keeps all of the activities/lessons to one page or one page front and back...

This book offers over 300 pages of fun...There are plenty of trace and copy handwriting exercises but there are many more fun activities that use problem solving, coloring, riddles, matching, and many skills that are necessary for our kids to function in the real world...

I think this book would make a great and thoughtful gift for any kindergarten or pre-k kid... It's also the sort of book that would be great for grandma's house or even just to grab a few pages and bring them with you...

ps. the corners of the book are rounded on the opening side/edge... and the paper is a nice weight...The quality should keep this book in one piece (or however many pieces you tear out!) through all 300+ pages!)

I've seen a lot of products like this, but this is by far the most comprehensive and entertaining for kids. The book is divided into the following sections:

ABCs: 3-4 activities per letter that reinforce letter recognition through mazes, letter tracing, coloring, and practice writing both lowercase and uppercase letters

Phonics: reinforces word and sound recognition with activities like 'circle the pictures that begin with A', identifying the short vowel sounds, and sounding out rhyming words

Spelling and Vocabulary: activities focus on the sight words: I, my, you, and, a, the, is, are, he, she, see, go

Numbers (up to 12): similar to the ABC section but focusing on numbers and counting

Shapes and Colors: identification of colors and shapes

Patterns: takes the shapes/colors section a step furhter by introducing pattern recognition

Sorting and Matching: takes the patterns section a step furhter with activities like 'match the baby animals to their mothers'

Time and Money: identifying time on a clock face, practice writing time (12:00), circle the correct time for each clock, reading time on a digital clock vs a standard clock face, identifying and counting money

Community: identifying different community buildings and professions, writing your own address

Science: identifying the 5 senses, the 4 seasons, recycling, plant growth, animal habitats

Fun and Games: to wrap it all up, there is an extra fun section with more mazes, dot to dots, cut out flash cards, etc

The back of the book also has reward stickers and a pull out picture of a clock to which you can add moveable hands and hang on your wall

I can't get over all the activities jam packed into over 300, easy to pull out, pages. You would have to buy several different activity books to capture all of the lessons included here; and the sections on community and science you rarely find in books like this at all.

When I saw these books on Amazon, I debated whether to go with the Kindergaren book vs the Preschool book for my 4 year old. I decided to go with the K level and figured if it were over his head I'd put it away for a year. I am really glad I went with the K level. There are definitely sections that are a little too hard right now(like the time and money, spelling and vocabulary, etc). But there are SO MANY activites he can do right now, and I know that we'll grow with this book over the next several months.

Finally, as for whether kids like the book, my son practically grabbed the book out of my hands when it came in the mail. He immediately ran and got a fist full of colored pencils and came running over and said 'can we do it right now mommy?'. And so we did.

Considering how many books about .NET there are today, it's surprising how many of these books are really rather good.

However, there are a number of books that are truly GREAT. This is one of them.

Quite simply - if you're a .NET developer, you owe it to yourself to buy this book, regardless of your level of skill with this or any other technology - there are few people with the skills, background and expeirence and sheer ability to write coherently that can exceed Jeff Richter in Windows development overall, and his ability to detail just HOW the CLR and .NET FX work is unsurpassed.

Essential reading.

This book is really fascinating. It's the only book I've seen dealing with the the inner workings of the CLR. It really helps understand what's going on when writing C# code. Highly recommended! A lot of substance!

If you want to know what is going on under the hood, thn this is THE book.
Every chapter is very in depth with good examples. Definite YES for the geek inside you. 5 Stars.

Possess a driving license? That probably means you know the mechanics that makes cars work. Thereby the skill necessary to ferry ourselves to and from places in daily life.

Wait, what has this gotta do with reviewing a technical computing book?

Well, you knew incorrect air pressure worsens tyre grip, accelerates wear & tear, and reduces fuel efficient, right? You knew improper engine tuning may lead to unsynchronized valve and spark plug timings, resulting in severe loss of power, right? You knew air bubbles in brake fluid can result in inconsistent application of brakes and uneven deceleration, right? Ah, so many important factors of physics revolving around the science and engineering of motoring. Yet so subtle and unknown by the vast majority of motorists. And ignored. Never realising what performance-leaking sins they commit against their cars.

This very book will expose the fact that you are effectively guilty of the same level of ignorance with the .NET CLR as you go about your daily programming work.

There are tons of titles covering the use of technologies and frameworks that build on top of Microsoft's .NET Framework. By and large they are fine, fulfilling the needs of developers as they work on the real purposes of their jobs - delivering beneficial (or entertaining) value to users and industries. But so few step into that deeper realm to discuss the very thing that makes this all possible. The very heart of the .NET framework, at its core, the mighty execution engine known as the CLR. Jeffery Richter takes a different approach by removing the shroud of magic surrounding the CLR and the C# compiler, exhibiting the internals and explaining all the little crucial activitites it does behind the scenes so that programmers can carelessly forget and not bother.

He organises the book into five parts and twenty four chapters of excrutiating detail:

Part 1 CLR Basics
Chapter 1 The CLR's Execution Model
Chatper 2 Building, Packaging, Deploying, and Administering Applications and Types
Chatper 3 Shared Assemblies and Strongly Named Assemblies
Part 2 Working with Types
Chapter 4 Type Fundamentals
Chapter 5 Primitive, Reference, and Value Types
Part 3 Designing Types
Chaper 6 Type and Member Basics
Chapter 7 Constants and Fields
Chapter 8 Methods: Constructors, Operators, Conversions, and Parameters
Chapter 9 Properties
Chapter 10 Events
Part 4 Essential Types
Chapter 11 Chars, Strings, and Text
Chapter 12 Enumerated Types and Bit Flags
Chapter 13 Arrays
Chapter 14 Interfaces
Chapter 15 Delegates
Chapter 16 Generics
Chapter 17 Custom Attributes
Chapter 18 Nullable Value Types
Part 5 CLR Facilities
Chapter 19 Exceptions
Chapter 20 Automatic Memory Management (Garbage Collection)
Chapter 21 CLR Hosting and AppDomains
Chapter 22 Assembly Loading and Reflection
Chapter 23 Performing Asynchronous Operations
Chapter 24 Thread Synchronization

Take a good look at this list topics, and honestly ask yourself if you know everything about how the CLR facilitates all these? Most approach the CLR as a black box - I knew myself to be one - and in result only knew what was sufficient to work with it, which in turn developed quite a number of misconceptions about it. Jeffery Richter goes through chapter by chapter and puts me through a constant pace of surprises, shocks, and pure enlightenment. He goes as low a level as the CLR can operate, and communicates in terms of memory locations, CPU registers, and gives the repeated impression that many of the CLR automated activities we take for granted has a performance cost. The material he writes about are astounding and sometimes downright shocking. It goes an extremely long way to remove whatever misconceptions you may have about the CLR or compiler, influencing you to rethink about many of the habits and practices you have now.

Challenge some examples. Just a small number of matters. Did you know C# constants are really only good for referencing within its own assembly? Any referencing and use of constants in other assemblies are hardcoded at the MSIL level. Do you know the exact garbage collection sequence the CLR takes to identify generations of orphaned objects and housekeep the memory? What does it take to resurrect an object from the Freachable queue? Why are finalizers generally not recommended? How would you compare strings with the added dimensions of encoding and globalization cultures? How do you construct strings and convert types to and from strings? What are the implications of unboxing a Value-type object from a Reference-type variable and assigning values? Did you know an assembly need not necessarily be just a single .DLL file? How does the metadata for your types turn out in the assemblies as the compiler emits the IL equivalent of your code?

Each chapter brings to light information you never knew you needed to know. As much as possible, Jeffery Richter provides code samples and programs to demonstrate his points and prove the effect. He not only provides the information, but lists many alternative ways to achieving a said effect, along with pros and cons for each method. He is here to explain, not to sell the CLR, and does not hold back on what he honestly thinks are design flaws by Microsoft. At almost every junction, you will feel vulnerable by the knowledge he passes to you. If you ever felt snotty and arrogant over your knowledge of the .NET Framework, this book is the antidode to humble yourself. If you ever positioned yourself to learn more about .NET, you will surely rejoice with gladness.

For all the great depth to be had throughout the book, a topic that I found notably absent is how the CLR actually performs interoperability with unmanaged layers in the OS. There is only a brieft touch on it in the first chapter. The WIN32 and COM platforms are still cornerstones of Windows development; it would have been ideal for developers like myself who began development after the advent of the .NET Framework.

Even then, this is one book you'd repeatedly refer for years to come to double check you don't commit another subtle mistake. By the time you are half way or perhaps even a third way through this rich material, you would have understood the term "managed code" is a literal description and not a marketing buzzword at all.

Overall rating: 10/10
Good: In-depth tour under the hood; shocking revelations; you were wrong, and will rethink;
Bad: No true chapter and detailing of P/Invoke and COM interop mechanics; seriously, why is this not in the SDK?

The book is oriented toward experienced programmers. It provides an introduction to the CLR and describes some intermediate topics in detail. Advanced topics are mentioned, but the coverage of advanced topics (such as CLR hosting) is shallow.

If you are an experienced programmer who is new to the CLR and C#, this is a great text. If you already understand the CLR and are looking for more information about advanced techniques, this book is probably not for you.

I love this book-as a Spanish major, I consider this the "bible" of Spanish grammar. It breaks down every aspect of Spanish grammar-even small things. It gives examples of how to use it and examples of common mistakes by English speakers. It is complicated and I would not recommend this for beginning students. It "speaks" to you believing you have a certain amount of previous knowledge that might confuse beginning learners.

I think this book is probably the most thorough Spanish grammar book I've ever seen. It's quite detailed. I keep it on my bookshelf at home and use it as a reference. This is a grammar book that no Spanish student should be without. A must have!

This book is exactly what I have been searching for! It covers everything the english speaking spanish student could want. It is detailed and gives excellent usage examples. It can be somewhat tidious on certain points. Despite this, it immediately became an indespensible part of my library. It is very thorough. I love it.

Here is a standout presentation of the ins and outs of contemporary Spanish. Examples of idiomatic usage are generously supplied, but fine points do not get in the way of the basics. Altogether an exemplary text--well-orgnized, lucid, and thorough.

Even as a beginner in spanish, studying mostly at home with books and digital files (Learning Spanish Like Crazy and Rocket Spanish) and occasional visits to a local spanish tutor -- I have found this book to be my best source for grammar clarification.

I purchased about 5 grammar books. My other favorites were actually workbooks rather than reference sources -- likely to diminish in usefulness as I progress. While they seemed easier at first, I would be tripped up by inconsistencies here and there and gaps when I tried to extend beyond them to reading spanish texts. In some cases my tutor could not explain what I needed about a particular grammar rule or common usage pattern.

After about 3 months of using other references, I finally became more comfortable with finding my answers in this reference. So far every topic I have explored was included, usually with pretty good thoroughness. When a rule seems to deviate from the expected, or no consistent rule applies -- it is acknowledged. When there are regional trends -- these have also been documented better than in any other reference I have seen.

It took me awhile to have enough Spanish exposure to understand some of the details, but with time it has been well worth the money and effort. Now I've come to rely on it almost exclusively.

It clearly outshines the others on my shelf. I expect it will remain a classic reference as my language skills continue to develop. I wish I could find the equivalent book for English -- because while working with my spanish tutor I realized that I couldn't easily explain some of the grammar rules of my native language either!!! Like her, I sometimes had to just say that I just knew what sounded right. This comprehensive reference gives much more satisfying answers.

This is a copy for our 3 year old because our 10 year old wants to keep his forever!
What a fun story to read to any child!

My two nieces and I read this one all the time.

Gritch the Witch needs piggies to make the piggy pie she craves. But pigs are very clever animals (trufax!), and they quickly disguise themselves.

Every time Gritch asks one of the (disguised) animals where the pigs are, they hilariously quack quack, moo moo, and cluck cluck her all over the farm! Eventually she stops before the Old MacDonald, the man himself, for him to look look here, look look there, etc. and tell her the same as everybody else - no piggies!

All her tantrums don't help. She can't have piggy pie :(

Even the Big Bad Wolf sympathizes, while both of them plot, at the end, to eat the other.

Very funny book. Every page, every word and illustration. My nieces (5 and 2.5) even act this one out!

Only thing is that sometimes they get scared of it, occasionally for a week or two at a time. Other times they bring it out to me and request it, but sometimes they're scared and won't have anything to do with it. Kinda like a roller coaster, maybe?

Check this one out at the library, see if it suits your child's temperment, and consider that it might be better meant for an older child.

Also, be aware that Gritch, being a Wicked Witch, isn't a very nice person. Aside from her tantrums, she insults nearly everybody in the book when they give her the bad news - dumb duck, lousy seed spreader, walking milk machine - and threatens them as well. If this sort of thing concerns you, please be aware of it.

This fractured folktale is about a witch that is craving some `Piggie Pie.' She goes through her pantry and finds she has everything she needs except for that all important ingredient--PIGGIES! At first she is outraged but eventually composes herself and devises a plan. Where can she find a piggy? The zoo? The circus? She finally decides that the best place to secure some pigs would be on a farm. After looking through the yellow pages, she travels to Old MacDonald's farm to grab the missing ingredient. She gives her victims a warning as she writes in the clouds, "Surrender Piggies!" The pigs devise their own plan; they plot to outsmart the witch by dressing up as other farm animals. They fool her by disguising themselves as ducks, cows, chickens, and even old MacDonald. When the big bad wolf happens to come along, he offers advice to the witch and tells her to give up--after all, he remembers those 3 pig brothers! Now, her taste changes from piggie to wolf and she graciously invites him over for `lunch'...
Piggie Pie is a delightful story that incorporates several classic folktales including The Three Little Pigs, Old MacDonald nursery rhyme, the traditional evil witch as the villain, and the famous three little pigs. Due to the structure of this book, students will improve their understanding of the different subcategories of traditional literature. The author includes descriptive language such as repetition, alliteration, expressive language, and affective adjectives that highlight the text and bring the story to life. Such examples include the witch describing her tasty meal options with phrases like "boiled, black, buzzed feet" and "plump, juicy, pink piggies." This whimsical, witty story will capture student's attention and can be used as a model to enhance their understanding of what it means to read like a writer.
Throughout the book, Palatini's text enhances student's vocabulary and contains repetitive phonemes that enrich their growth as a reader. As Cunningham describes, tongue twisters, like ones found in the text, play a crucial role in developing students' phonemic awareness. For example, "eight plump piggies for piggie pie" is a silly and fun phrase that the students will enjoy saying and simultaneously will develop their oral language. Students will be exposed to new vocabulary words, such as curdle, passel, and muttered. Encourage students to use elements of Palatini's writing and transfer her techniques over when creating their own literature.

This is one of my favorite children's book and I love to give it as a gift.
As a Kindergarten teacher it is my pick!

My family loves this book. My husband reads it to my children, ages 13, 5, and 1. They love it, he does the voices of the characters, which is great fun for everyone. My oldest says this is her favorite book from when she was little. I'm buying copies for my toddler aged neice and nephew.