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  • Everything I Need to Know Before I’m Five
  • Elizabeth Bush
Fisher, Valorie. Everything I Need to Know Before I’m Five; written and illus. by Valorie Fisher. Schwartz & Wade, 2011. [36p]. Library ed. ISBN 978-0-375-96865-5 $20.99 Trade ed. ISBN 978-0-375-86865-8 $17.99 Reviewed from galleys R 2–5 yrs

Kindergarten looms on the horizon (cue ominous music) and anxious parents everywhere fear their offspring won’t ace the kindergarten-readiness testing. Surely there must be a prep course! If not, try Fisher’s compendium of pre-school concepts that, once mastered, should provide enough fuel for a successful academic launch. Colorful photographs of toy tableaux guide children through number identification and counting from one to twenty, ten common pairs of opposites, a baker’s dozen of plane shapes and solid shapes, eight colors and a rubber-ducky color-mixing chart, four seasons, six weather conditions, and the upper- and lower-case alphabet. The plastic toys give a pleasing dimensionality to the clean compositions, and the tiny retro-styled dolls that pose among paper collage and found objects invite close inspection. Though there are a couple of glitchy entries, there are many more solid ones, and the wry playfulness of the figures interacting in their surreal world (a little man has evidently sucked the liquid through the straw in a preposterously large glass; the wee photographer shooting the interior of an alligator’s mouth in “open” has disappeared in “shut”) should keep little learners enthralled. Now, if they can only memorize their address and phone number—and not the speed-dial version.

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