The Neighborhood Mother Goose

Rating:
Summary: The Best Goose
Review: My two boys love this book. Each night they pick 4 of their favorites for me to read. After two weeks of reading this book - they know almost all the words to all of the poems. This is a great way to teach kids the old rhymes with cool hip photos and computer manipulations which make the tales leap off the page and in to your home.

An English professor told us that the best way to instill a love of reading in to your child is to encourage them to memorize and enjoy nursery rhymes and tales. This book is the perfect first intro.

Rating:
Summary: The Best Goose
Review: My two boys love this book. Each night they pick 4 of their favorites for me to read. After two weeks of reading this book - they know almost all the words to all of the poems. This is a great way to teach kids the old rhymes with cool hip photos and computer manipulations which make the tales leap off the page and in to your home.

An English professor told us that the best way to instill a love of reading in to your child is to encourage them to memorize and enjoy nursery rhymes and tales. This book is the perfect first intro.

Rating:
Summary: Modernizing Mother Goose
Review: Old nursery rhymes with a new look. If your child has ever wondered what "pickled peppers" were, pick up this very contemporary look at favorite rhymes. Illustrations are an update to the old style that left young ones wondering what some of the rhymes were about. Crews gives Mother Goose a new look that was long overdue. Kids love this one!

Rating:
Summary: neat picture book
Review: The Neighborhood Mother Goose features 40 nursery rhymes. Some of them are well known such as Humpty Dumpty and Little Miss Muffet. Yet there were a few in the book that we did not know in our family. The book features color photos of kids enjoying life in their neighborhood

The pictures of all the different children were interesting to look at. We also enjoyed hearing a few nursery rhymes that we did not know in our family.

The book would make a great story time or bedtime tale. You could read a few rhymes at a time to your child and discuss what they are all about.

Rating:
Summary: Everything Old Is New Again
Review: We all know and love them, those little rhymes and verses we learned as children. Nina Crews brings new life to these timeless treasures in her book THE NEIGHBORHOOD MOTHER GOOSE. In the book, which includes over 40 rhymes and verses, she pairs such verses as "This little pig went to market," "Rain, rain, go away," and "There was an old woman who lived in a shoe" with her stunning photographic creations. The photographs feature children from a variety of cultural backgrounds, and as a result any child that reads the book is sure to find someone on the pages that look like them. I also liked the fact that the photos included both mothers AND fathers interacting with children in a positive way. This is a book that I highly recommend, because it can serve as a way that parents can share a part of their childhood with their children. Many of the collections of nursery rhymes that I have encountered include dated photographs that are not particularly exciting for today's children. The eye-popping and intricate photography is worthy of endless discussion in its own right. This book is definitely a must have for any young child's library.

Reviewed by Stacey Seay
of The RAWSISTAZ Reviewers


Rating:
Summary: On my way to where the air is a-okay
Review: When I first heard of "The Neighborhood Mother Goose" I misunderstood what it was. I had been under the impression that the author had taken classic nursery rhymes and updated them significantly so that they'd be approachable by today's kids. Instead, I found that the rhymes have stayed pretty much exactly the same. What Nina Crews has done is compliment each rhyme with heavily Photoshopped images of modern urban kids having a grand old time. Sometimes these work brilliantly. Sometimes they look sadly fake. There's a good example of both on pages 14 and 15. I was especially taken with the picture that comes with the poem that begins, "Cobbler, cobbler, mend my shoe". In the accompanying photograph a boy stands outside a modern shoe repair store, the handmade sign standing out front. Unfortunately, the photo extends to the opposite page where a boy is pulling fishies out of his ear for a different poem. The cobbler poem was a great way of introducing kids to an older poem as well as teaching them the meaning of the term, "cobbler". The fish poem... not so much.

Nina Crews really has found a grand cast of kids in this book, though. The girl who runs away from the potentially skeezy Georgie Porgie does so with real pep and verve. I loved the girls doing the hand rhyme to the classic "Pat-a-cake" poem and I loved the lady on the merry-go-round who embodied the lady with "Rings on her fingers and bells on her toes". Crews has brought the color and variety of New York to the printed page, and that's not an easy job. But for every fabulous merry-go-round photograph there's a poorly created Jack jumping over an enormous cupcake/candlestick.

I get a little sad when I think about how it's possible that the kids in these photographs will probably look fairly dated in ten years or less. Yet even more depressing is how dated the photoshopping is today. I think the book was better in idea than in execution. Still, this could easily be one of the best ways to get today's children interested in yesterday's rhymes. And I think there are enough fabulous poems and photos in here to make up for the poor ones. Definitely check this puppy out if you've the time. It's an interesting experiment in modern storytelling.