Alphabet (Paula Wiseman Books)

[[VIDEOID:mo1FXQWZ0TP38H9]]"Alphabet" is our second book by Matthew Van Fleet - our first was [[ASIN:B004PJHIIO HEADS (BOARD BOOK)]] which our daughter really enjoys. If you have never seen one of the Matthew Van Fleet books please see the video portion of the review. The books are completely interactive - they offer a variety of textures, colors, and moveable panels that offer hours of fun for little hands. Alphabet introduces you child to a variety of animals that start with the various letters of the alphabet. What I like about it is that it offers a little more variety than you would expect - for example for the letter "Z" most of us would expect "Zebra" but "Alphabet" uses the "Zorilla" - instead of a "Whale" you get a "Warthog" and things like that.

Other notes

- I would strongly suggest that you buy "Alphabet" or any Matthew Van Fleet book from an online retailer. These books do damaging rather easily when played with young hands. As a result, almost every copy I saw at a box store had damage,

- A great gift for your child or for a niece or nephew that happens to have a birthday.

- Comes with a wonderful "Alphabet" poster that has a variety of tabs that reveal an animal. See the video review for an example. The poster alone is nearly worth the price of the book.

- Lots of texture, animation, tabs and silly situations for the animals.

Final Verdict - Probably my new favorite Van Fleet book - very highly recommended.

5 Stars

What a great book! You can learn about the alphabet as well as fun and friendly animals all in one place. The concept and pictures are very much like "Tails", another great book by Van Vleet, so if you were a fan of that book, you will like this one as well. The author rhymes his way through the alphabet with visual and tactile delights, while describing animals--some familiar and some slightly off the beaten path. Your child will love the friendly illustrations of alligators, dragonflies, elephants, and frogs, while you will scratch your head and wonder how you could have gone your while life and never heard of a quahog, uacaris, or xenops--all great new Scrabble words! The fact the he chose "zorillas" for the letter "Z" and not the standard "zebra" you would find in most children's books shows that he refuses to "dumb down" a book--instead challenging young children with new ideas.

What I really like the most about this book is that it can "grow" with your child. Very young children will enjoy touching the different textures and making the kangaroos "jump". Older children will enjoy looking back through the book for the challenge of finding other alphabet word pictures that the author provides in the back of the book. You also get a 21-inch color poster included with the book that has pop-ups of the animals with corresponding letters that you can use to teach letters (or animals for that matter) to hang in an older child's room. A very worthy investment for your home library.

We just love his books and this one has fun for many ages! Our 11 month old loves the textures (and to pull off the moving parts, we are saving them to glue back on later). Finding the animals and plants will be a lot of fun later and we can't wait until he is old enough to have the poster in his play area. So many gifts in one book!

I just want to start this by saying that Heads and Tails are my daughter's ABSOLUTE favorite book (and ours actually)! They flow nicely with great almost lyrical rhythm that literally gets stuck in our heads. Cute pictures, A LOT of fun things to touch, feel, move, and look at. That being said, Alphabet is not Matthew's 100%! We like it, we like that it rhymes, but the first page segment and the last page segment do not rhyme...feels weird and put of place. :( Not our favorite, was looking forward to so much more. The pages in between are pretty good, Octopus with sticky tentacles my daughter gets "stuck" on, but nothing compared to our family favorites; Heads and Tails! If you need to choose one, go with Heads, but they are both GREAT!! Alphabet is good to own, but definitely not the top choice in our house.

This book is so much fun, even adults love looking through it. I gave it to my 7 month old nephew and he couldn't get enough of it. He laid on his belly and touched everything, and was infatuated whenever we made anything move (he especially liked to watch the warthogs shake their heads). The pages of this book are also sturdy enough that they weren't ruined when he drooled on them. The book was even educational for the adults - my 30 year old brother-in-law went straight to the dictionary to look up Zorilla because he thought they had made it up, but it was in there (it's a skunk like African mammal). We absolutely love the pop up poster that is included with the book. Children will certainly learn a lot from this book and poster. One word of warning though: the scratch and sniff stinkbug really DOES stink. I convinced my brother-in-law to try it out, and he definitely regretted that decision! Overall, this is a high quality book with lots of tactile fun that children will get years of use and learning out of. It is worth every penny.

This book is both visual & tactile for child.
Teaches alphabet, includes poster & other activities searching for various other animals, objects, vegetation using the alphabet.

The book is well made so hopefully after many readings the 'pop-up features' remain in tact.

The illustrations are also well done.

Super adorable and durable - can withstand the destructive-iest of toddlers! Our kid absolutely loves the Matthew Van Fleet books, but has destroyed almost all of them (and still begs to read them). This one is definitely one of his favorites AND it's quite durable- he has not managed to rip it apart yet. It has great different textures, a find "seek and find" hidden feature, and great movement pages. It's a very fun book to read and experience with the tots. Highly recommend

If, for some reason, your child is bored to tears by alphabet books about more standard animal choices, then maybe this is for you. But I wish we hadn't bought it. Somehow, this is a very annoying book. Lots of reviewers praised its use of non-standard animals for the letters, but zorillas and [I can't even remember the others, despite a zillion repeats of it]? I'm a biologist, and I've never heard of lots of these animals. If my child will never again see or hear of the stuff in the book, I'm not sure it'll ever matter that she's seen it here, and the book fails to teach her letters for things she actually will see and hear of again. We like the fact that this line of books is interesting to touch and look at - that's why we buy them (this is our third one), and our 20-month old daughter loves them. But I wish this book just didn't work so hard at being annoyingly 'different' for the sake of being different. The nature of the series would have been enough to get me interested - now I certainly won't buy any more of the series until I inspect them in person to gauge their annoyingness. The first two we bought, CATS and MOO, were great.

Amazing book for babies and toddlers. The illustrations are adorable and the story line is great. Reading it 5 times in a row didn’t completely turn my brain to mush! It’s a favorite of both my kids. We’ve bought it twice and have gifted it to friends. 5 stars!

Love all his books, but this one is my favorite. We have gone through 3 in 10 years because my kids read it so much. My advice is to keep it on a high shelf so they can’t read it alone because if they do, kids will inevitably break one of the pop ups or moving parts... it’s very well made, but that’s just what happens if you let a kids loose with this book. Anyway, love it and I buy it for every baby shower I go to.