Moon Dance is one of a series of “sparkle” books, which means that each page has cutouts backed by a variety of sparkly foils. The foil backing sparkles through the cutout with one of a variety of bright colors and different patterns. For example, the cover of the book has the letters of the title cutout revealing sparkling patterns of squares, lines, and random polygons in all the primary and secondary colors.
The story of the book takes place underwater with the dolphins, but the story is secondary to the beautiful artwork and the sparkles. My daughter likes this book but, as you’d expect, is not nearly so interested in the story as with other books. She really enjoys the underwater scenes and trying to find new animals each time we read it and tracing the cutouts with her finger.
So I recommend this book to younger readers…or to pre-readers, I guess. The imagery is sure to delight.
This is one of the often cited classics for Dr. Seuss. It is one of the “I can read it all by myself” collection of beginner books and is perfect for preschoolers learning to read. The book is sing-songy and is fun to read (for kids and adults).
Originally published in 1960, it remains an ideal first reader since it overwhelmingly consists of monosyllabic words. In fact, you have to count 20 words in (page 3) before you get to a multisyllabic word…and that is “little.” Additional two syllable words include “mother,” “father,” “seven,” and “something.” The only “big” words are “everywhere” and “another.”
I particularly like the repetition of the most common words as in this passage:
We took a look.
We saw a Nook.
On his head
he had a hook.
On his hook
he had a book.
On his book
was “How to Cook.”
By repeating “hook” and “book,” the reader gains confidence in their reading skills more quickly. The first time they encounter a word, they work out what it is. The second (and third or more) time, they immediately recognize it because they have seen it so recently. This encourages the child to read more because they get immediate feedback showing what they are learning.
The only issue that some might have about using this as a “learning to read” book is that it does, in classic Seussian style, make up words like “Nook” in the preceding passage. (The Nook is a yellow dog-like creature in pink long underwear and a pink hat with a pole sticking out of it, holding the hook.) Everyone of these is a simple, one syllable word that should be easy for the reader to sound out because they all rhyme with the surrounding words. However, depending on the parents’ preferences, it may not be desired to have to constantly tell the child which words are “real” and which are not. Personally, I like to encourage as much creativity in my children as possible, which is why Dr. Seuss was (and is) a staple in my reading life and in my children’s.
Most people don’t know that my best friend and I started a Dr. Seuss club in college. It started as something of a lark based on our shared love for all things Seussian…but we quickly found out that there are a lot of other Seussites out there! We started out just getting together to read Seuss books but capitalized on the opportunity to do something good. We gave Seuss reading at local elementary schools and raised money to buy books for the schools’ libraries. We even received a letter from the man himself encouraging our group.
The only requirement for participation in the group was to memorize a Dr. Seuss book of your choice. For me, this was an easy choice. Fox in Socks has always been my favorite Seuss book (and I already had most of it memorized). I quickly memorized the rest and I still quote it to this day. (You’d be amazed how often you can find cause to quote Dr. Seuss in the corporate world… 
)
Quick Review: This is a tongue twister book. The story is about a Fox and a man (?) named Mr. Knox. Fox tries to get Mr. Knox to repeat tongue twisters and Mr. Knox gets increasingly frustrated with the Fox.
The fun part of this book is trying to keep up with some quite challenging twisters. One of my favorites includes Luke Luck and his pet duck and their affinity for licking lakes–
Luke Luck likes lakes
Luke’s duck likes lakes
Luke Luck licks lakes
Luke’s duck licks lakes
Luke Luck takes licks in lakes Luke’s duck likes
Luke’s duck takes licks in lakes Luke Luck likes
The conglomeration of words ending with a ‘k’ sound with just an ‘i’ or ‘u’ differentiating them makes it very easy to mess this one up. In fact…it’s not hard to imagine how a slip of the tongue on this one could cause you to say something quite embarassing. (In fact, I actually did this to my friend. The local television station was filming our group for the evening news and I planned the reading so that he would have to read this page. He did, as planned, transpose the ‘L’ and the ‘D’ in a very inappropriate fashion. Needless to say, the TV crew edited that portion out of the show. )
If you haven’t ready Dr. Seuss before, this may not be the best book to start with. It’s particularly difficult for younger kids (my 4 year old won’t even try)…but it’s a lot of fun for us older children!.
My name is David and I’m the admin for NewBookAlerts.com, a frequent blogger, and an avid reader.
I started ReleaseAlerts.com because I was frustrated by missing the latest releases by my favorite authors and by having to waste time every couple of weeks by searching Amazon for new books from an ever-growing list of favorite authors. So the site is, first and foremost, a convenience for me, and anyone else, to allow me to indulge my laziness and read more books.
The blog portion of the site came later. I’m a computer geek by day and blog about technical topics, so I thought why not about my books as well? I’m always interested in new authors and seeing what my friends are reading. So I started looking for blogs about recent books and couldn’t find many…so here we are.
Generally speaking, my tastes run from the thiller/suspense to science fiction categories…but I also read technical, non-fiction science books and others from time to time. Having two young children, I also read a lot of kids books. I’ll blog about all of these as possible. And I’ll invite others to blog as well. If you’d like to blog on NewBookAlerts.com, shoot me an email at admin@NewBookAlerts.
Hope you can benefit from the service and hope you enjoy reading the blogs.
-david
