Hours of fun guaranteed from these two Nosy Crow board books – thanks to the publisher for sending them for review.

My First lift-the-flap Nursery Rhymes
illustrated by Ingela P Arrhenius

In this sturdily built, large format nursery rhyme board book Ingela P Arrhenius illustrates fourteen popular nursery rhymes and songs, each with a flap to lift. Her beautifully patterned, striking scenes playfully hide either key elements of each rhyme, or sometimes, additional characters. From Sing a Song of Sixpence to Incy Wincy Spider and Little Miss Muffet

to Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star, it’s never too early to introduce little ones to the delights of nursery rhymes, the bedrock of playful language, though sadly many children start preschool knowing none at all, or only one or two. On the back cover is a QR code to scan enabling adults and little ones to listen to and sing along to the rhymes as they turn the pages of what I suspect will quickly become a favourite book that parents and carers will enjoy sharing over and over.
The same is true of

Bizzy Bear My First Memory Game: Things That Go
Benji Davies

Containing four scenes with lots of action going on – the construction site, the city, the airport and outer space – each venue offers three games to develop memory skills and enhance the vocabulary of little humans. To play hide-and-seek the sliders all start closed and a little hand should open them one at a time and then search the full page scene opposite for the vehicle revealed. Matching pairs requires players to remember the positions of the vehicles beneath the sliders and the search and find game has three questions, the answers being found in the relevant large illustration.

Bizzy Bear has a special role to play at the building site: he drives a large yellow bulldozer clearing the site for the other team members to begin their work. The city scene shows a railway line as well as things that go up in the sky and on the road. In this illustration, Bizzy Bear is a passenger on the train rather than a worker.

He’s taken on a new role as a pilot of the jumbo jet in the airport scene and finally, in the space scene Bizzy is an astronaut. His rocket has just landed on a green planet far from earth where there are aliens waiting to greet him – let’s hope they are friendly ones. Benji Davies’ Bizzy Bear character is already popular with young children: I suspect he’ll win even more fans with this book.