Review: Stimulates Conversation
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 11 15, 2012
I think this Kindle picture book works well for a number of reasons, but the primary one is that it stimulates conversation. We start off with the tortoise and the hare, obviously a lot of time has passed since these two had their famous race as they are both now very old. They are also obviously very good friends having got over whatever rivalry they had. The link to the famous old tale will instantly be pointed out by those you're reading it to.  The second is the duckfish's eyes move from one page to the next in two different parts of the book, this is a great stimulation for an activity of showing kids how animation is created by getting them to draw stick men or something where you teach them to draw the same figure only slightly different on each subsequent bit of paper then flick the pages and it moves, just like the duckfish's eyes in this book.The illustrations are pretty interesting too, the story itself isn't a complicated one, there's not that much text either compared to some of A.J. Cosmo's other picture books.  I do think some of the author's other stories are better than this one, and granted a bit more entertaining, but Duckfish does stimulate conversation on how everyone doesn't have to fit into preconceived categories of who or what they are, depending on the age of your audience you could then start talking about race, ethnicity, careers, school social group labelling, whatever the case where not everyone fits neatly under a label and if they don't there's nothing wrong with that either.  I can't think of too many other picture books that tackle this subject so I think Duckfish is an important read.