Comment by quadrangle | Hacker News Reader

Comment by quadrangle | Hacker News Reader

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I don't like this idea of grouping them all as similar. There's a huge range of toddler-focused books, some are great, some are awful, most are in-between.

Brown Bear, Brown Bear from Carle himself is mediocre junk. It's just colors and animals, and has no character, no narrative, no arc.

The Hungry, Hungry Caterpillar is an amazing, astounding masterpiece. It is usually printed with a sort of dynamic tactical approach with different page sizes, holes in the pages, the story has a real arc, it teaches biology, it carefully works in numbers and days of the week and the idea of time frame… it's a true stand-out.

Most of Carle's stuff is somewhere in the middle, though he has a few other superb ones.

Just like art for older audiences, there really is a range. You could say that all movies are the same: people having conflicts and doing stuff. On some level, they're all dramatic and simplistic.

It's not mere taste. What makes a great book or movie for any age is not total relativism.

Brown Bear, Brown Bear is an excellent book for very young children (say, under 2 years old). It’s not a deep book, but it is not trying to be.

It has attractive clear illustrations of one animal per page, a simple repeating structure with only a few new words each page, nice rhyme/meter. Its structure involves repeatedly anticipating the next animal, which makes it easy to memorize.

It is a book my kids enjoyed “reading” aloud to themselves at age 1.5–2 before they could fully remember the content of more complicated picture books.

* * *

Of course, this isn’t the only type of book small kids should be listening to, and in the genre of extremely simple picture books there is a lot of abject garbage.

Like the other commenter I also thought the book was a dud and had nothing going on. But the "a teacher is what I see" finally clicked that series' large pictures were designed to communicate at distance. When my 8 month old wants to grab everything and not settle down to sleep, I can read her that book while she's in the crib and the calming cadence does its work. Will be fun to see her read it like your kids one day.

I can much more readily appreciate actually doing I-spy game in a physical space rather than a book like that.

But I'm not actually opposed to the basic structure of "animal color" that Brown Bear has, I think it could retain that and somehow also get more effective nuance. It's entirely superficial. Note also that 2yo's don't have an experience and relation to classes and teachers, so that doesn't even fit. The very same structure could be less arbitrary and be used instead to connect associations that are worthwhile making for the 2yo's, the way that Hungry Hungry Caterpillar doesn't just show randomness, it actually fits a real biological context.

Adapt Brown Bear to highlight an ecosystem that goes together and it would be superior and still achieve all the same interest in the 2yo's.

My kid went thought a phase of really liking "Brown Bear, Brown Bear." Probably about the same age. And I think you're right -- it's the anticipation of seeing what the next animal / color combination will be.

Another one in a similar vein, which my kid liked, was "Here Are My Hands"

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