Potato Joe

I checked this out of the library for my 6 month old. Once I got the hang of how to read it right, my 6 month old loved it. The pictures are very simple, but each picture also has a small ant hidden somewhere in the picture and this will make the book more appealing for older kids. My main complaint is that the book is so darned huge. Good for classroms ... bad for lying in bed. After returning the book to the library, simply reciting the text of the book to my son is enough to put a smile on his face.

This book will grow on you like....potatoes and dirt! It's a take off on the old counting-out rhyme (which is not in the text, so you might want to brush up on it before you read this book out loud to kids, which you will love doing). Like his other titles, Hickory Dickory Dock and Big Fat Hen, this one takes old rhymes to new places and features nice big print for little readers to enjoy. Potato Joe (who has brown eyes, just two of them) comes up with new uses for his potato-pals: tic tac toe and some snow covered tiers then a rodeo with some do-si-do action. How about a tall potato pile (would the Brits call it a rugby scrum?), a celebration of roundness with Tomato Flo and Watermelon Moe and a final journey back to the garden, back to the rich cool dirt, "where we potatoes grow". This would pair nicely with Two Old Potatoes and Me by John Coy or Cynthia de Felice's One Potato Two Potato (which is actually a "little pot that wouldn't stop" story) and then engage kids in a potato patch activity planting potatoes. As a food lesson, it would be great fun to introduce purple potatoes, fingerling potatoes, Yukon golds and little round reds, but Potato Joe looks like a russet to me. You could use this to do a counting lesson, some art, some history of potatoes, even ordinals and cardinal numbers using Potato Joe and his pals. The endpapers of the book are a velvety rich brown, the pages feature enticing brown dirt under a sky that changes page by page from green to purple to blue to yellow over and over until the final scene when the welcoming brown dirt takes over the page. Keith Baker, who is a very tall artist and writer, visits schools and libraries. His website, keithbaker.com has all the details. And we must mention that no potatoes were harmed in the making of this book!

This is a cute little book full of potatoes, spuds of various sizes and expressiveness. The one potato, two potato ryhme is retold with some additional long o rhymes added by the author. The artistry is first rate. Only the multiple spellings of the long o sound would pose any problem. It's a shame the spellings aren't consistent, but that's the nature of our language.