C&C Children's Book Review: Mrs. Peanuckle’s Whimsical Nature-Based Series
Mrs. Peanuckle’s board books are colorful, whimsical celebrations of mother nature. Each book takes a fresh approach to the typical alphabet primer. In the six book series, you’ll read how “A” is for avocado, albatross, asparagus, aspen, ant and aster. Honestly, I appreciate how entertaining these books are to read (even as an adult) since most pages have quirky, fascinating facts associated with each letter.
The series include: fruits, vegetables, birds, bugs, flowers, and trees.
Age Range: 2-5
What I Love About This Series:
It’s easy to either abridge or expand each book to fit your child’s comprehension level. For my youngest, I sing the alphabet as we saunter through Peanuckle’s pages together. When I read the books with me oldest child, we can make a single page the theme-for-the-day—like when we read about mangroves in the Mrs. Peanuckle’s Tree Alphabet and ended up learning all about manatees and made our own salt water. By the end of the day we’d watched this mangrove mystery video a couple times and played “Make A Mangroove” too. All in all, the books make for great discussion points.
I also think it’s neat that you can download this as an ebook if you are trying to cut down on your printed-book-footprint.
Mrs. Peanuckle books are published by the Rodale Kids, a smaller division of Rodale Books (the company known for publishing Vice President Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth and Bill Nye’s Everything All at Once.)
A portion of the proceeds from every Mrs. Peanuckle book goes to the Rodale Institute.
The Rodale Institute was started over 70 years ago when J.I. Rodale first discovered that healthy soil = healthy food = healthy people. Rodale pioneered a movement to help farmers see the merit in growing organic food with organic soil. The institute trains rural communities on how to make organic farms economically viable. It also partners with with schools, hospitals and other organizations to help people make informed choices about eating for health. Love it!
Good To Knows: The illustrations in these books have a lot going on, it might not be the best option as an alphabet introduction for the newest of readers.
About the Author: From what I can tell, Mrs. Peanuckle is a pseudonym, so I couldn’t find anything about the actual author. Although, I’m rather content knowing Peanuckle writes lovely books and has a great sense of humor.
About the Illustrator: Jessie Ford is a British illustrator who paints and draws in her seaside studio in Hove (a town just west of Austen’s infamous Brighton). Ford has illustrated for the likes of Apple, Starbucks, Kiehls, Volkswage and Goop. This, of course, isn’t surprising since her bright illustrations are just delightful.
Happy reading.
Cheers,
Hazel
