At My House is a lift-the-flap shadow book aimed at kids over 1 year. The pages are thick and contain pictures of everyday items in and around the house. Every picture is covered with a flap that lifts open. The flap displays a shadow of the picture underneath it and is printed on brightly coloured backgrounds. The flaps open in different directions. My 2 year old’s little fingers quickly learned to open the flaps and provided her with an excellent fine motor skill workout.
The name of every picture is printed in bold on the back of every flap – making it a good tool for teaching little ones to read. The bright coloured backgrounds on which the shadows are printed provided an additional opportunity to teach my little one different colours. Our baby of 3½ months found the contrasts of the black shadows on the bright backgrounds very interesting, which meant that I could share this book with both kids at the same time.
I found that at the age of 2 my daughter got bored with the ordinary picture books. This shadow book however provided extra stimulation and a sense of excitement as there were things to discover underneath the flaps. At first we had lots of fun playing a guessing game with the new book. “What is behind this shadow?” The book also has questions on every page to make the game more interesting and also to teach kids different things about the items on every page. My daughter could relate to the pictures in the book and was very excited to see “her bike” and “her bath ducks”, etc in a book.
The only downside is that with a lot of use by destructive toddler hands the flaps might bend after a while. This is however an excellent, colourful and fun book.
Review by Joanita, Johannesburg, South Africa
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