Alphabets Are Amazing Animals
Anushka Ravishankar and Christiane Pieper
Tara Books pbk
I don’t subscribe to the current obsessive view of phonics as the best way to teach early reading – far from it; however I am a big fan of alliteration and it certainly helps in giving children an awareness of initial sound/symbol associations/phonemic awareness. Alliteration is also, when done well, poetic. Even when it’s not, that repetition of the first consonant or vowel (more tricky) can be enormous fun for children learning language or learning to read. This book of carefully constructed, playful sentences written by Anushka Ravishankar is a great boon. More than that though it’s clever and a delight to share with  individuals, a group or a class. They will relish the twenty six silly sentences each of which features a different animal (sometimes more than one per letter) …

boldy rendered in Christiane Piper’s delightful pen-and-ink illustrations: A –has Anteaters, B, Buffaloes…

and so on, and will be painlessly absorbing lessons about sentence structure in so doing ((subject, verb, object, adverb, adjective are all there in those sentences).
I particularly like those Mice:

The gum gobbling geese gives one giggles …

the sight of those Uakaris is … utterly unsettling to say the least.

And it’s great to see that X has a real animal too – a type of gull.

This one is sure to result in young listeners and readers relishing the opportunities it furnishes to rush off and create their own silly sounding super sentences.

In addition, this book could be a great one for speech therapists working with individuals who have difficulties producing particular sounds.

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