Cows!

by John Hutton MD, Doug Cenko (Illustrator)

Overview

Support your toddler's developing literacy with Cows!, a book uniquely designed to help families establish reading habits from an early age. Play and learn with cows of all colors, shapes, and sizes. Questions within the book provide a built-in tool for grown-ups to use while reading, encouraging little ones to expand on the story. This type of interactive reading, known as "dialogic reading," is key to developing early literacy skills.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781936669721
Publisher:	blue manatee press
Publication date:	04/02/2019
Series:	DR. Books
Pages:	14
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 5.50(h) x 0.40(d)
Age Range:	3 Months to 3 Years

About the Author

Dr. John S. Hutton is a pediatrician and clinical researcher at the Cincinnati Children's Hospital Reading and Literacy Discovery Center and owner of blue manatee children’s bookstore. Doug Cenko is an illustrator living in Chicago. He has worked at an animation studio, a live special effects company, and design agencies, but illustration is what he truly loves.

Editorial Reviews

2019-04-28
A question-and-answer exchange about farm-dwelling bovines.

The project begins with "Hey Diddle, Diddle," with words missing from the iconic rhyme, prompting little ones to fill in the key words. Subsequent double-page spreads encourage dialogic reading, an early literacy practice in which parents, caregivers, and educators ask open-ended questions to encourage language and vocabulary development, as the back cover notes and the text actively models. Cenko's opaque, jewel-toned paintings are a mélange of panels of various sizes and graphic clues sprinkled with question marks. Some of the illustrations are droll, clever, and recognizable. However, some panels may be too small for little ones to see enough to identify and label objects and actions. Young children who are ready for a dialogic-reading approach are often also ready for paper pages and longer texts, so this can be considered more a book to get caregivers comfortable with the practice than one that is aimed squarely at toddlers.

A clever approach in search of the appropriate format. (Board book. 2-4)

Kirkus Reviews