School Library Journal

PreS-Gr 2-Two selections that are short, sweet, and delightful. The simple texts with repetitive phrases and picture clues are perfect for the youngest readers. Lascaro's colored-pencil and paper-collage illustrations in Down on the Farm are bright, bold, and thoughtfully placed on each double-page spread. An animal is shown on the left side of the page while a young girl imitates its action on the right side ("I see my duck swim. I can swim like my duck"). With a slightly longer rhyming text and the artist's familiar pen-and-ink and watercolor illustrations, McPhail's humorous book is also right on target. Big Bear is brown but soon changes color as Little Bear accidentally knocks into his ladder while he is painting a tree house blue. After cleaning up, Big Bear returns with green paint and readers are left with a giggle as the next impending disaster is suggested. In both books, the illustrations fill the pages while the text is plain and clearly set in an appropriately large font on a white background. You can't go wrong with adding several copies of these terrific books to your beginning-to-read collection.-Gale W. Sherman, Pocatello Public Library, ID