Possum Magic Animals product reviews

Possum Magic Animals is a very simple board book. Throughout the story it is one word on each page and that it the animal. They are all Australian animals which appeals to my girls with their Australian heritage and collection of soft toys and puppets from across the ditch.

The illustrations are lovely watercolours with little or no background. It is simply the animal. In a couple of the pictures I didn't think the animal was very clear but as soon as I said the initial sound Miss 3 could tell me what it was. This is a book for young children. The toddlers I care for preferred this over the other picture books I had been given to review.

This would be a great book to prepare a youngster or a trip to Australia. Mem Fox and Julie Vivas have done a lovely job creating this. I was able to get my five year old to read it to me and she told me that it was a kangaroo not a wallaby because it started with k. I was very pleased with that in her first week of school. So this simple book is also a great teaching tool for emergent readers.

I hadn't read the original Possum Magic Story book although I had heard of it but this book appealed to me as my son loves animals!! At the moment most animals are either a cat or a dog as they are the two words he has in his schema that he identifies with animals so introducing some new names is a good thing to help him learn new words.

I thought it might of been a story, I wasn't really sure what to expect, but each page has a picture of an animal and the animals name and ends with a final image of them all with the word friends. It is quite sweet really as a basic little book and the images are beautiful. They are simple illustrations that have that friendly cartoon type look to them but are so detailed as well that you can tell what the animal they represent looks like.

My son is only 18 months so this book is good for him for a short story time. He will now sit and listen to a full story especially if it is a book that captures his interest but it is nice to have little short books like this were we can just focus on learning new words and new animals. All the animals are Australian animals except for the possum we also have in New Zealand.

We read this, this morning and I went and got the Kangaroo toy he has from his room and showed him the kangaroo toy was the same as the Kangaroo in the book, which spurred him to get more and more soft toy animals wanting to know what they were called.