karen blair – Aussie Reviews

Let’s play music,
make a beat.
Clap your hands
and stamp your feet.

Beautiful babies scamper through the pages of this delightful offering, making music with their hands, feet and voices as well as with musical instruments. They are surprised when they realise their cat can join in, too. They spend the day sharing their music before sleeping soundly and happily.

Baby Beats is a joyful celebration of music, friendship and babies. The toddler characters sing and play together, revelling in the music and each other’s company. The mix of ethnic appearance and gender is a really pleasing aspect of the illustrations, and the simple, rhyming text, makes this a lovely read aloud title for young children.

A companion title to Baby Animal Farm, Baby Beats is gorgeous.

Baby Beats, by Karen Blair
Walker Books, 2014
ISBN 9781922179074

Available from good bookstores or online.

Let’s go to the baby animal farm!

Follow the adventures of five gorgeous toddlers as they explroe the baby animal farm – feeding lambs, following ducklings, even eating lunch and losing (and, luckily, finding) teddy bears.

Baby Animal Farm is a beautifully simple celebration of baby people and baby animals interacting. The text is simple, inviting toddlers to join in with Quack, quack, quack. Cheep cheep cheep and so on. The illustrations in pastel watercolours with crayon outlines are not too busy, but have enough detail to engage toddlers, who will delight in spotting what happens to teddy early in the story, and how he is found. A really nice touch is the cultural diversity of the five children. The end papers too are special – with the baby animals awake and waiting for visitors at the front of the book and sleeping at dusk in the back.

Suitable for reading to newborns through to preschool age children, Baby Animal Farm would make a wonderful gift.

Baby Animal Farm, by Karen Blair
Walker Books, 2012
ISBN 9781921720376

This book is available from good bookstores and online from Fishpond.