BooksForKidsBlog

Monday, March 25, 2019

Up and Down, All Around: A Parade of Elephants by Kevin Henkes

LOOK!

It's lines of parading pastel pachyderms, papas, mamas, and petite baby elephants, five in each panel.

What are they doing?

They parade on each panel, left to right, trunks up, right to left, trunks mostly down, and left to right again, on each page.

BIG AND ROUND AND ROUND THEY ARE.

ROUND AND ROUND AND ROUND THEY GO.

The elephants enter a cave-like tunnel. In they go and out they come, holding onto each other's tails to find their way.

The elephants parade all day until night is near. YAWN! They trumpet up good night stars and get ready to sleep under them, all five curled up together.

Kevin Henkes' A Parade of Elephants (HarperCollins, 2018) is the perfect pachyderm parade for the nursery school set, always five elephants, always in a line, demonstrating up and down, in and out, back and forth, and all those directional concept words that little ones need to describe their world.

Kevin Henkes, one of the few creators of children's books to have won both Newbery and Caldecott Awards for insightful novels and brilliantly illustrated picture books, gives us inviting, slightly smudgy blackline illustrations filled in with lightly shaded pastel watercolors of elephants marching, marching, marching, through panels on each page to the music of his simple narration, right into a snuggled bedtime under a starry sky of their own creation." Says Publishers Weekly, "With clear, bold type sized for puzzling out letters, this spare offering will appeal to preschoolers who, like the elephants, are settling down to their starry sleep." "A must purchase for all libraries," School Library Journal adds in their starred review.

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