By Iona Opie
More than sixty of the nursery rhymes you already half-know by heart, gathered into one big book that works as a baby's first library.
Here's the whole songbook of early childhood in one place — more than sixty of the rhymes that get handed down mouth to mouth, from Humpty Dumpty and Little Miss Muffet to Hey Diddle Diddle and Jack and Jill. There's no story to follow. You open to any page, start a rhyme, and your child fills in the last word before you get to it. Iona Opie spent a lifetime collecting these, and Rosemary Wells draws each one with a round, rosy little animal, so the old words feel warm and close.
For a baby or a toddler this is the first book that's really a whole library. A rhyme is short enough to finish before a small child squirms off your lap, and there are dozens of them. Your child hears the same words enough times to start guessing what comes next, which is where reading starts. It's a lap book, a bedtime book, and a car-seat book at once, and it grows with them, from babbling along to reciting the whole thing on their own. Mine held onto ours from the crib well into kindergarten.