By Sandra Boynton
A cow says moo, a sheep says baa, and then three pigs sing 'La la la!' instead of oinking. It's wrong on purpose, and your toddler will love catching it.
It starts sensibly. A cow says moo. A sheep says baa. Then the book announces, completely straight-faced, that three singing pigs say 'La la la!' — and any toddler can tell you that's not right. Sandra Boynton keeps going through a whole barnyard of animals and their noises, all in a short bouncy rhyme, and closes by turning it over to your child: 'It's quiet now. What do you say?' The pigs are the joke, the animal noises are the fun, and the whole thing is short enough that you'll finish before a squirm turns into a meltdown.
Boynton wrote these board books for exactly this age, and it shows. The rhyme is tight, the page count is tiny, and every animal is a chance for your child to make a noise, which is most of what a one-year-old wants from a book anyway. The singing pigs land because a lot of toddlers already know pigs don't sing, so they get to be the one who's right. And ending on a direct question ('what do you say?') turns reading into a back-and-forth, which is how the youngest children learn that a book is something you join in on, not just sit through. It also holds up to being chewed on, dropped, and read a hundred times, which any board book at this age has to.