Farm Families product reviews

This is a brilliant book for young children and the as a hit with my 3 year old. My boy loves animals and although this simple book doesn't have much to read it has heaps to look at! The pictures in this book are amazing in fact reminding me of oil paintings. I love the broken egg shell effect applied to each picture.

The pictures tell more than the words themselves being that there is just one word per page naming each animal. But if you look closely at each picture you can see the farmer going about his day from morning to dinner time. From feeding the animals to rounding up naughty piglets there is lots to discuss in each picture. With my boy we have taken to using the book as a discussion opener. We look at the pictures and talk about what the farmer does and what the animals are up to now.

You can count the number of words in the book on your hands but don't be fooled this book actually takes ages to read because there is so much more to look at. I now can't get away with simply reading the name of each animal although this is also good for learning the farm animal families, like cow, calf, bull! I can see my son will probably grow out of this book quickly but for now this book has a lot of interest to him.

All in all a great book and well worth the money if you have young children!

With the love of Alison Jay books I was excited to be able to review this book. Farm Families appealed to me with my love of animals and was expecting a story like many of her other books.

I was slightly disappointed when I opened this as there was only one word on each page. There was no story. There did not seem to be any set pattern to the naming of the animals. At first I thought they were correctly naming mum, dad and baby eg cow, bull, calf, but this did not seem the case. It then quickly turned to looking at the name of the animal and the name of its young eg pig - piglet. I would have liked to see a bit more consistency with how it was written. On saying that though my older boy used it as an opportunity to test his mother on her own knowledge of animals.

Although I found the words in this book disappointing the soft illustrations made up for it. Each illustration was filled with numerous smaller pictures that encouraged a lot of discussion amongst the family. Finding connection between pages was also fun. Although I love Alison Jay books I would struggle to find many ways to use this book other than talking about the illustrations.