Travelling Moose ¦ Tell-Tale Tiger ¦ Spider Spy

These additions to the 'Help Your child to Read' series are, in my view, a great improvement on the first batch. Each begins with two pages of very sensible and helpful advice aimed at parents (though some teachers could benefit from reading it too) and it should go a long way in persuading everyone that parents can and do have a vital role to play in their children's development as readers.

Travelling Moose is a counting rhyme in the style of 'Ten little Indians' but here we start with six - a moose and his five friends - who together set off on their travels and one by one, fall by the wayside.

Tell-Tale Tiger tells how a story-telling tiger entertains a group of children in the jungle. As well as the main rhyming narrative there is bubbletalk and the occasional narrator (bird) to reader comment. Spider Spy, again in rhyme, is not really a story, more a series of incidents built around a game of I-spy, each item spied being used as the focus of that particular incident:... P for pudding/b for baby/c for crawl/Blow me down/he's eaten it all!'

The sense of fun in Allan Ahlberg's text is in each case, fittingly served by the illustrations of André Amstutz.