Review Detail

This Caldecott Honor Book was a big hit with my storytime kids! My story time parents, grandparents and babysitters got into this one too; they were snickering and laughing at the notes the cows, chickens and ducks wrote and the reactions of Farmer Brown. This is a funny little story about the cows on Farmer Brown’s farm who have learned to type; they start making demands and go on strike and it snowballs out of control from there. It’s not particularly deep or anything, but I suppose it could be seen as a story about compromise. Personally I used it as part of an “animals doing silly things” theme, and that seemed to go over very well.

I really like the slightly messy, somewhat sketchy illustrations that Betsy Lewis drew. They’re cute and engaging, and the kids seemed pretty entranced by this book. They also ended up joining in on the repetitive “click, clack, moo” portions of the book. I’ll definitely be using this one again; maybe next time I’ll use it in a storytime with the other books in Cronin’s series.

(Review was first posted on my blog, Scribbled Flyleaf: http://scribbledflyleaf.blogspot.com/)