Book Recommendations: Shape; The Coloring Book

Here’s my third book-recommendation post in honor of the Share a Story – Shape a Future Blog Tour for Literacy. (Here are the first and second.)

Today’s books take an artistic turn. Both are from Abrams Books for Young Readers, and published in conjunction with Britain’s Tate Museum.

David Goodman and Zoe Miller’s Shape has colorful and creative mixed-media drawings and photographs that remind me of the short segments on Sesame Street when various letters, numbers, or shapes float around in time to music. There’s a little touch of the I Spy School Days books, too.

The book might at first glance look like a preschooler “introduction to shapes” book, however, but it is really aimed at a slightly older audience. Rather than just telling us “This is a square, this is a circle,” it explains the main characteristics of each shape (“A triangle has three straight sides and three corners”) as well as additional concepts like, “A quarter circle is called a quadrant.” It even gets into 3D shapes like spheres, cubes, and circles. Readers are asked to find the shapes hidden in different pictures, or given ideas for further activities, like tracing a tangram and cutting it out. It’s a nice bridge between the “shape” board books you bought your toddler and the geometry lessons your kids will get in school, all wrapped in an artistic package.

Speaking of art, Hervé Tullet’s The Coloring Book should knock your socks off it you have an artistic bone in your body. I may keep this one for myself, to color after our son’s gone to bed.

The book contains images that are concrete, abstract, impressionistic, and occasionally surrealistic, a mix that makes it stand out from the great mass of “color the truck, color the pony” books. There are paint splatters and scribbles to color in, along with superheroes, flowers, and birthday cakes, and a few people that look like they were taken from Picasso’s childhood sketch pad.

A coloring book may seem an odd choice for the “Share a Story” event, but if a picture is is worth a thousand words, there are more than a few good stories tucked away in this 200-page volume.

Tullet includes fun suggestions on many of the pages. A page of dancing stick figures asks, “What are the right colors for happy people?” Facing pages, each with a dangling pair of cherries, say, “Sometimes cherries are red . . . . Sometimes not.” It’s a coloring book that encourages thinking, if not coloring, outside the lines.

One minor LGBT caution: One page has a wedding-like picture of a prince and a princess, with the caption, “Every coloring book needs a prince and a princess.” With luck, your kids will already be thinking outside the lines, however, and know that this isn’t the only way the world can be. Don’t let it stop you from getting this book. It’s a real standout.

Thanks to Green Dads for alerting me to the Share a Story event.