Alphabet book

This delightfully quirky new alphabet book, translated from the French, encourages an interest in letter shapes. Each page shows a large upper case letter and under the flap is an everyday object whose shape links with the letter. So we have a pencil pictured for the letter ‘I’, a boot for the letter ‘L’ and a back view of a rotund seated cat for ‘Q’. Linking letters to the shapes of objects in the environment is reinforced by a jolly game using the same pictures folded into a large flap at the end. Matching letters with shape rather than the first letter of an object’s name is unusual and might not please everyone. One limitation is that the shape link rules out showing lower case. But recognizing the shape and orientation of letters is essential learning for a beginning reader and writer and some children will benefit from the emphasis in this book. Different things are learnt from different approaches and, hopefully, children will see more than one alphabet book. This one deserves a place at home and in nursery school collections.