Food Hide and Sneak by Bastien Contraire

Bastien Contraire’s Hide and Sneak series of board books has a new addition: Food Hide and Sneak! Illustrated in bright shades of watermelon pink and watermelon-rind green, each page has a hidden secret. A visual game of hide and seek for babies and toddlers, on every page, Contraire sneaks in an item that “does not belong.” Perhaps there’s a sneaky umbrella hiding in a line-up of ice cream cones, or a ladybug hiding among rows of fruit. With its clean layout and stylistic design, you’ll be looking twice to find the item that’s hiding sneakily among its counterparts. A great first book for toddlers learning to read visual differences in illustrations.

Don’t miss Bastien Contraire’s other books in this series!

Undercover: One of these Things is Almost Like the Others

Vehicles Hide and Sneak

Animals Hide and Sneak

What Does Baby Want by Tupera Tupera

Listed as one of the best books of 2017 by Publisher’s Weekly, What Does Baby Want by Tupera Tupera will get to the heart of the matter: what does baby want? This book is best for new moms (and hungry babies). Baby’s face fills the adorable circular format of this board book, and with each page flip, baby gets upset when offered a tambourine and other circular objects. Why? Because baby is hungry, and it is time for breastfeeding! The design of this book is so clever because the circular format not only encompasses baby’s face, but also mama’s breasts. What Does Baby Want  is a great gift for a baby shower--or for the mom who might relate to breastfeeding her hungry child. Tastefully done and funny at the same time, Phaidon’s design and concept is breaking new ground in books for newborn babies.

Watch the video of the book from Phaidon!

Circle, Triangle, Elephant!: A Book of Shapes & Surprises

A simple book of shapes turns into a delightful game in Circle, Triangle, Elephant by Kenji Oikawa and Mayuko Takeuchi. A vibrant board book for children ages 0-3, it is indeed a “Book of Shapes and Surprises.” It begins innocently enough, with a red triangle balanced on top of a pink circle balanced on top of a blue square. The next page is not too different, with the order being “circle rectangle triangle.” But, turn the page and there’s an elephant?! Smack dab between a triangle and a circle. Each page turn brings more unexpected surprises, such as a boat, a face, and lemons! This book is a great way to teach children to recognize basic shapes even when the order and color of the shapes change. Read this outloud enough times, and soon, your child will be pointing at the shapes (and other surprises), reading, “Circle, Triangle, Elephant!”

Flora and the Chicks A Counting Book by Molly Idle

Has spring fever hit? For Flora, it means that her chicks have hatched! When she goes to feed the mother hen, the hen walks off the page...leaving Flora to count the newly hatched chicks! This counting book is full of exciting surprises behind every flap. From 1 to 10, Flora must take care of the little chicks as they hatch, but it gets harder to hold all the chicks in one place! When the 10th chick hatches, the mother hen returns, and all the chicks, and Flora, are happy to see her. Molly Idle’s character, the little girl Flora, has several other wordless picture books, including Flora and the Flamingo, Flora and the Penguins, and Flora and the Peacocks. The illustrations are so expressive that the reader has no trouble understanding Flora’s thoughts. In Flora and the Chicks, Flora will help children learn to count with the help of ten fluffy chicks!

Heads and Tails by Madeleine Deny, illus. Peggy Nile

Heads and Tails is a Let’s Step™ Books to Grow On book that encourages active participation in the reading of the book. Peggy Nile’s delightful illustrations reflect those animals drawn by Richard Scarry. A board book, each page is cut out into the shape of an animal. Babies and toddlers will learn different animals by flipping each page, revealing the next animal. From the smallest mouse to the largest elephant, each animal asks, “But who comes next?” Each animal is also associated with a sound, and keywords are highlighted in bold. “Splash! The frog jumps into the water!”

Chronicle’s new imprint, Twirl, contains a plethora of immersive, educational and fun books for babies and toddlers. Heads and Tails is the perfect book for ages 0 to 3 that combines bright colors, animals, and sounds.

Watch the adorable video demonstrating the best way to read Heads and Tails from Chronicle Books.

Limitless Play

Yusuke Yonezu

 Moving Blocks by Yusuke Yonezu models for youngest children how creative they can be with basic block shapes: squares, circles, triangles, and rectangles. With minimal text, the pages show rather than tell examples of how children can construct the familiar things in their world and let their imaginations soar.

Yonezu uses predominantly primary colors (with the occasional touch of secondary color green) and bold black outlines to reveal the modes of transport children uses every day: a car, a bus, a train, ship, plane and rocket. Each page appears like a giant mosaic, a puzzle to be unlocked with the turn of a page. For each two-page spread of small blocks neatly fitted together into a giant rectangle, a die-cut hole reveals the hidden vehicle on the next page, and a telltale sound provides another clue ("Sssssh, big doors opening... It's a bus"). The stark-white background helps young eyes easily distinguish the colorful bus on the page.

Interior from Moving Blocks

These are blocks that move, and the answers children discover from page to page move people from place to place. Yonezu proves that the simpler he keeps the ideas, the more possibilities they open up in the imagination of a child.

The Power of Words

Richard Scarry

Perhaps no one knows the power of words more than a toddler just starting to name the people, places and things in his or her world. Richard Scarry's Best Little Board Book Ever taps into that instinctive wish and helps youngest children take control of their needs. 

Richard Scarry understood that by naming the things around them, children begin to gain power. They can ask for what they need. They may not always get what they want (how many times have we heard them say, "I need it" when referring to a coveted toy or sugary cereal), but they can in fact get what they need, and they can be understood. 

The author-artist takes that very basic desire to communicate and gives children a way to take control of their world. As Frannie the bunny goes through a day very much like readers' own, she describes waking up, getting dressed, playing with friends--all the way through to bedtime. Scarry gives Frannie a constant companion in a little green bug (the bug, too, has a doll to cuddle with). Later, in the story Daddy reads Frannie at bedtime, the little green bug makes a number of appearances and ties the entire book together. Scarry provides enough of the familiar to make the new vocabulary easy to digest.

Cause and Effect

Matthew Van Fleet

Matthew Van Fleet knows toddlers. His books zero in on one characteristic that fascinates them--in the case of Munch!, it's mouths and what animals do with them. Toddlers gnaw on everything, and Van Fleet's strong, durable pages, tabs and moving parts are built for those teething mouths.

But he also thinks through every pull of a tab. Each allows youngest children to see how things work. The pull-tab opens a mouth, and pushing the tab back into place closes it again (except in the case of the beaver, which wiggles the beaver's head and makes a "buzz" to indicate its teeth's whittling capabilities).

Toddlers get to see cause and effect. It's a big lesson for a small child, to see that they can make things happen. Author-artist-paper engineer Van Fleet thought through every part of this board book, and it's a perfect match with audience members that often lead with their teeth. Bravo!

Form and Function

Not every book is meant to be a board book.

Some board books are really for adults, meant to be given like greeting cards (think of the Urban Baby series). Some are misfired adaptations of picture books, with too much text, or ideas too sophisticated to work well for babies and toddlers. Colors and Opposites by Xavier Deneux were conceived of as board books; their form and function serve their baby and toddler audience beautifully.

What can a baby, a one-year-old, a two- and three-year-old absorb? How do you make these ideas manageable for a child who is unlocking the secrets of the universe? You have to begin with their world, the things they see and touch.

Colors gives babies and toddlers much to explore with their fingertips--raised parts of the pages that fit into indentations on the opposite page. Children start to see how a book works; turning the page completes the puzzle. Rounded edges to the pages keep them safe. Later, toddlers will understand Deneux's double entendre with orange as a fruit and orange as the color of a sunset.

A friend of mine has twin girls who just turned two. They now get the humor in Emily Gravett's Orange Pear Apple Bear. They have had enough experience with oranges, pears and apples (and seen bears in books and pictures) to see that Emily Gravett is playing with the bear's shape and color, and with its relationship to oranges, apples and pears (as one that consumes fruit).

That is the beauty of the board books that earn most favored status in toddlers' lives. There's more for them to observe, touch, and discover with each rereading. As they gain more experience and exposure to a wider world, they see more meaning in the book's pages. On that same "orange" page in Colors, for instance, toddlers will begin to perceive the bird's size as an indication that an orange is small enough to sit upon, while the sunset is very large indeed, so large that the bird can only approach and never reach it. The joy, for those of us reading with toddlers, is watching these epiphanies occur, and seeing their eyes light up with understanding.

Keep It Simple

Taro Gomi

Japanese author and artist Taro Gomi proves the power of simplicity when it comes to board books. Peekaboo! is mostly about encouraging the interplay between parent and child, or grandparent and child, or older sibling and child. The book itself becomes the conduit for a game of peekaboo.

His simplicity is easy to take for granted, yet it shows his mastery for connecting with his audience. He uses an animal or creature's prominent feature to define it. The bulging eyes of a frog set atop its head, the large round ears that dominate a mouse's triangular face. He uses solid colors and rudimentary shapes. The tickle monster is a purple blob ("I like to tickle. I am a monster"), and it looks cuddly rather than creepy because of two baby teeth and a popsicle-pink tongue hanging out. (Gomi uses this same strategy in Mommy! Mommy!: the bright pink comb atop the chicken's head becomes the identifying characteristic that leads the chicks to their mother, who's playing hide-and-seek with them.)

The die-cut holes in Peekaboo! allow adults or older siblings to look out at babies and toddlers through the eyes of the frog, mouse or tickle monster (and then segue into a tickle game, of course). It's such a simple idea, yet so rarely well executed. The design allows a baby to focus on the consistent placement of the eyes, the stated "fact" for each creature ("I like to eat cheese. I am a mouse"), and to "master" the tool of prediction. Bravo!

Visual Literacy

Mary Murphy's (I Kissed the Baby!) latest board book, Quick Duck!, attests to why her storytelling is ideally suited to this format. She repeats the title phrase, then lets youngest book lovers know--in just a few words and brush strokes--where the duckling is on the path to (as we soon discover) his or her family.

Last weekend, at the Bank Street College of Education, the Center for Children's Literature (where I serve as interim director) hosted its first Writers Lab mini-conference, "Early Childhood Literature: What Do You Need to Know?" Laura Vaccaro Seeger delivered the closing keynote, and focused on visual literacy. "At some point, we stop seeing things the way a young child does," Seeger said. We stop noticing things. Seeger skillfully uses die-cut pages in many of her books to draw the eye to specific details--books such as The Hidden Alphabet, and her two Caldecott Honor books, First the Egg and Green. With a turn of the page, we continue to notice those details within the context of a larger picture. She teaches us how to see, to notice, all over again.

Seeger also talked about a game she played with her boys when they were little: "How little can I show and still convey an expression of surprise?" Is it the eyes, the mouth? This game later became the basis for her book Walter Was Worried.

Like Seeger, Murphy understands the importance of conveying only the essential details. She keeps the pages clean and the focus on her duck, with its thick black outline against a pastel, mostly white background. A thin green line makes a reed; a thick purple stroke transforms it into a cat tail. The path of muddy webbed footprints betray a sense of urgency and also tell us that the feathered hero knows just where to go ("Out of the mud!"; "Under the hedge!"; "Over the stones!") to arrive safely to a waiting mother and siblings.

Board Book Benefits

Interior from You Are My Baby: Farm

If you have a baby or toddler in your life, you already know the benefits of board books. You Are My Baby: Farm and Safari by Lorena Siminovich are my idea of the ideal board book. Because they were created as board books from their inception, the author-artist designed and executed them with very youngest children and very smallest hands in mind.

I got to hear renowned pediatrician and literacy advocate Dr. Perri Klass speak at the Bank Street College of Education a few years ago, and she talked about the importance of board books to the training of her pediatric residents. She said that they could learn everything they need to know by watching babies and toddlers handle board books. Do they pick up the board book by the spine? Can they turn the pages (motor skills)? Do they hold the book in its proper orientation (recognizing the images and viewing them right-side up)? Can they focus on what's in front of them?

Author-artist Siminovich presents each animal with one easily identifiable feature (a piglet's "curly, pink tail," a chick's "soft, yellow feathers") and the sound it makes ("Oink! Oink!"; "Peep! Peep!"). She essentially divides the book in two, with the baby animals having their own mini-book within the book. To help children match up the mother with her baby, Siminovich creates a background that serves as a puzzle would, allowing babies and toddlers to complete the picture. And at this age, the attachment to their own mothers is very strong, so the act of matching the cow with her calf, the horse with her foal, is in itself reassuring to babies and toddlers.

As you likely know, I love to extol the virtues of board books' endurance. Children can take them to bed, sleep on them, chew on them, drop them from a high chair, and Mom, Dad or Grandma can throw them in a back pack and keep them in the back seat for a long car ride.

It's so important that youngest children think of books as theirs, to have and to hold, to collect and to keep. And board books can handle their readers' rugged lifestyles.