Mick InkpenReviews

Independent Reading Level: Grades PreK-1
Awards:

First read Nov 2015
Reread - Mar 2016

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Colorful, fun, and mischievous, with loads of animals. For those of you who like a touch of darkness in their children's literature, my wife pointed out that there is some mystery as to the fate of the zookeeper: is he a victim of revolution?

I swear this book was written about my dog Demon. I think I need to purchase a copy to read to her. The story is told by the dog who admits that he can not stay, he runs away, he doesn't understand sit and stay. But I will love him anyway. And so will you.
+16 #TBRread

A perfect bedtime story

Kipper's A to Z in a great way to introduce young children to their ABC's. The simple illustrations are sweet and the kids enjoy finding bugs on each page. It has some unpredictable pages like, "Xx is for Xugglybug!" It also has a few fun predictable pages like, "Zz is for Zebra". I like how it shows the uppercase and lowercase letters. This could be a topic of discussion when teaching the ABC's to young children. We could discuss uppercase and lowercase letters. We could also talk about how different words start with different letters. Mick Inkpen has created an alphabet adventure sure to please young children. It would be best in the classroom for the younger grades.

This book was provided to me as an uncorrected digital proof by the publisher, via Edelweiss, in exchange for an honest review.

The author of the beloved Kipper series teams up with his daughter to tell the heartwarming story of a sweat-band-wearing pug who just can’t seem to do the right thing.
Dog is very badly behaved—he destroys everything, chases cars, rolls in poo, and won’t stop running away! But when he finds himself lost and alone there is one person he knows he can always count on.

Dog is the definition of incorrigible; he is who he is, and there’s no changing that. He is young, rowdy, and low on attention span, but he loves his boy. The narrative is cute, irreverent, rhymes, and is sure to catch children’s’ attention. Chloe Inkpen did a lovely job of illustrating the story, and the image of the dog pulling his boy’s sock off will make kiddos giggle. The best part of this read is the message that even the most poorly behaved dog (person) is worthy of affection and devotion. Dog doesn’t suddenly change his stripes, he is simply loved for who he is, and that’s something children need to hear.

Good quick book for children in the primary grades. It allows them to use hand gestures and will keep their attention.

It's a snowy day -- time to play! With his friends, Kipper discovers how to REALLY have fun.

Billy’s Beetle is a cute book about trying to find a beetle and Billy picks up a few more friends with him. The book is a pattern with picking up friends and at the end the beetle is found, but Billy is now lost. The book can be used by showing patterns and also counting the amount of people found along the way.

I think this book is an informational fantasy because it has animals that talk, but it is also very informative. This books creatively goes through the the alphabet naming different items and animals from A to Z. It is fun and silly. They use Kipper the dog who is well known from T.V. And other books. The pictures are great too because they are not too busy and show only what is focused on.

This is a story about a worn out, torn up stuffed animal, who we first meet in the attic. The stuffed animal refers to itself as Nothing. Nothing ventures through life trying to figure out what it is. When suddenly he meets a cat that takes him to a house where an old man lives. The old man recognizes Nothing as his childhood stuffed cat! This is a great story in teaching the importance of discovering who we are.

25 months - O was way beyond this book but she always likes Kipper so she looked at it a couple of times. I think there are other opposite books that cover more in board book format.

22 months - Kipper is always a hit!

22 months - you loved this one! Cute story too.

Billy had a beetle in a box, but he noticed that it was not there. He wondered and he asked a girl if she had seen it, but the girl says no. Billy and the girl begin to look for the beetle, and Billy sees a man and asks the man if the beetle was around. The man says that he did not see it, and the man helps Billy look for the beetle. Billy asks a lady if she has seen the beetle and the lady says that she has not seen the beetle. The lady joins the search for the beetle, and Billy sees a band and he asks the band if they have seen the beetle. The band says no, and the band joins the search. Billy feels sad and someone in the group finds the beetle, and Billy is happy. Friendship is displayed as an important quality in the book. Everyone in the book helps Billy to find his beetle, and they all become friends.½

In my opinion, the book " Kipper's A to Z" was a great book for young readers who are becoming more familiar with the alphabet. I really liked that this book included the lowercase and capital form of each letter. This gets the reader familiar with the different ways that the letter can be written depending on where it is located in a sentence. I also liked that the text was written in large print so that the letters were emphasized and the reader was focusing on the text. Each page was also very simplistic which is appealing to young readers and makes the words easier to read. I also liked how the illustrations were very simple. Most pages just had Kipper and his pig friend Arnold, along with one or two other characters and white space in the background. Again, this helps the reader to focus on the text and not become distracted by any busy illustrations. The big idea of the story was to teach young children about the alphabet.

Kipper builds a sandcastle at the beach and then looks for the perfect item to top it.

Like the other books in the Kipper series, this is a fairly simple and straightforward story. This one does have more of a plot than some of the others, so that is a good thing. The book isn't preachy or overly moralistic, but there is a teachable moment in here regarding how Kipper problem solves and finds a solution of his own making.

The toddlers in my class listened to this book attentively and then were thrilled to find out we were going to a sand playground to make sandcastles of their own, allowing them to make a text-to-world connection.½

Kipper's Book of Numbers is a very basic introduction to numbers. Each spread contains a numeral followed by text saying that number and an animal's name, all accompanied by an illustration showing Kipper and those animals in the corresponding number against a white backdrop. For instance, the second spread looks as follows:

"2
Two hedgehogs"

and has a picture of Kipper pointing to two friendly-looking hedgehogs, all against a stark white backdrop, thus with very few accompanying details.

This book is recommended for ages 1 to 3, although I think some 3-year-olds may be bored with something so simple. However, my class of 2-year-olds quite enjoyed it, especially when I made it interactive by encouraging them to count the number of animals on each page as well as make the animals noises where relevant.½

In this book, Kipper illustrates a number of different opposites pairs such as day and night and big and small. There is no storyline at all, just the opposites pairs featured on a spread each with accompanying illustrations of Kipper with something different on each page - i.e., he is shown with a stick taller than himself for "long" on the left page and then shown having bitten the stick into pieces and holding what up what is left for "short." I don't know why, but I didn't care for this book much compared to some others I used with my toddler class for talking about opposites. I would chalk that up to just me having some odd aversion to Kipper (I also didn't like Kipper's Book of Colors much either but for some reason thought the opposites one would be better.) But the kids in my class didn't seem as interested in this one either. For me, the illustrations weren't the greatest and for a book with little text, that's not a good thing to say the least. If a book is only going to feature the opposites pairs text-wise, I prefer illustrations that seem a little more cohesive than these ones that exist in a weird background-less space. In addition, despite being very simple and thus seemingly geared at the youngest of readers (i.e., infants and toddlers), this isn't a sturdy board book but a picture book.½

This very short board book features the television character dog Kipper. Each spread of the book shows Kipper doing something in monochrome (i.e., riding on a gray elephant, painting a purple monster, etc.). The illustrations are well done, and there's definitely some creative ideas for displaying different colors - i.e., Kipper is playing with his shadow for black or baking something with a big cloud of flour for white.

Buyer beware that this book is very, very basic - best for infants and younger toddlers. There is no plot and nothing written beyond the color for each page. Nevertheless, I was surprised to find that the somewhat older toddlers in my class still were fascinated by this book - by and large because I have a group that absolutely loves to talk about colors and look at them. I even noticed one of the kids in my class picking up this book and "reading" it to himself. He used the more wordy version that I did when reading it - for instance, on the page for blue, I didn't just say the "blue" written on the text but noted that it was a blue kite up in the blue sky. I did this kind of expanding for each page so that the kids got a little more out of it.

This very short board book features the television character dog Kipper. Each spread of the book shows Kipper romping about in some sort of different weather condition (i.e., splashing in puddles for "rain" or sunbathing for "sunshine.") There is no plot and nothing written beyond the one-word description of the weather - "snow," "ice," "hail," etc. The illustrations are cute and well done, especially for some concepts that are a little bit harder (both to draw and to explain to small children), such as fog and wind. Still, this book is very, very basic - even a little too basic for the 2-year-olds in my class. This would be good only for the very youngest learners who still don't know much about weather patterns - or, alternatively, for die-hard Kipper fans.

Based on one of Jesus' parables this book is beautifully written and illustrated for children.

This book retells the story that Jesus told about the rich man in an easy to understand way, It is beautifully written and illustrated.