Harry and the Bucketful of Dinosaurs Gift Set
(2000)(A book in the Harry and the Bucketful of Dinosaurs series)
A Picture Book by Ian Whybrow
We bought this book for our young daughters (they were approximately a year and a half old at the time) after one of them expressed an interest in dinosaurs. We looked hard for a book that was both informative about dinosaurs, but not too scary. Many dinosaur books for kids have tons of information, but also less stylized pictures. For a very young child, we thought that more realistic pictures might be a turn off, and we wanted more of a story than merely a compendium of facts. This book hits a home run in both departments!
The entire story is very cute, but I was pleased to find a subtly deeper message than the main dinosaur story. In the story, Harry's sister spends nearly all her time 'on camera' watching TV, while Harry gets to have some rather large imagination fueled adventures. I really like the suggestion that a bucketful of dinosaurs (or anything really) can be way more fun than sitting in front of the TV.
The anthropomorphized pictures of the dinosaurs are good enough to identify them easily. The Tyrannosaurus looks like you expect him to, albeit cartoon-y, as do the others but our kids were able to repeatedly point them out to us, quickly caught on to their names and were even able to identify more 'realistic' pictures of many of the dinosaurs after only seeing them in this book. I'd call that a success. Besides the dinosaur pictures, the rest of the book is full of beautiful illustrations.
Sadly, as another reviewer comments on, they do use the word stupid once in the book. It is an unfortunate word choice, but easily replaced with silly when we get to that page. I may have to take more drastic measures to remove the word when my girls are old enough to read this on their own though.
The choice of a single word isn't enough to deter me from recommending this book, especially since it does so many other things right. A little bit of circumvention makes this an all-star in our collection. It will not disappoint!
Genre: Children's Fiction
The entire story is very cute, but I was pleased to find a subtly deeper message than the main dinosaur story. In the story, Harry's sister spends nearly all her time 'on camera' watching TV, while Harry gets to have some rather large imagination fueled adventures. I really like the suggestion that a bucketful of dinosaurs (or anything really) can be way more fun than sitting in front of the TV.
The anthropomorphized pictures of the dinosaurs are good enough to identify them easily. The Tyrannosaurus looks like you expect him to, albeit cartoon-y, as do the others but our kids were able to repeatedly point them out to us, quickly caught on to their names and were even able to identify more 'realistic' pictures of many of the dinosaurs after only seeing them in this book. I'd call that a success. Besides the dinosaur pictures, the rest of the book is full of beautiful illustrations.
Sadly, as another reviewer comments on, they do use the word stupid once in the book. It is an unfortunate word choice, but easily replaced with silly when we get to that page. I may have to take more drastic measures to remove the word when my girls are old enough to read this on their own though.
The choice of a single word isn't enough to deter me from recommending this book, especially since it does so many other things right. A little bit of circumvention makes this an all-star in our collection. It will not disappoint!
Genre: Children's Fiction
Used availability for Ian Whybrow's Harry and the Bucketful of Dinosaurs Gift Set