Surp Squiggly Wiggly

One of our family photos shows me sitting on the couch with our first child sitting on my lap at her first birthday party. She is obviously enthralled by the finger puppet of Squiggly Wiggly's Surprise.The book lasted through three children before we wore it out.Now I am buying it again for a grandchild's first birthday.

Squiggly Wiggly's Surprise by Arnold Shapiro is an interactive book in which the child uses a finger puppet caterpillar to learn about colors. Each page features a hole in the page that the finger puppet comes through to allow Squiggly Wiggly to experience something different on each page. From leaves to flowers, Squiggly Wiggly travels through the seasons and ends up making himself a cocoon in which he becomes a beautiful butterfly. This book teaches colors so that the child will be able to learn them by Squiggly Wiggly sitting on and eating green leaves, sitting on and smelling a red rose, yellow daisy, purple pansy, talking to a blue bird, and admiring the orange orange. The child becomes entranced by the finger puppet and, at the same time, learns what colors to associate with certain things by Squiggly Wiggly's contact with these flowers, fruits, leaves, and animals. The book also teaches a child about the life cycle of a caterpillar through the pictures and the finger puppet's involvement in these pictures. When Squiggly appears in the snow, he becomes very cold, and because it is winter the cold signals hibernation. In the next picture, Squiggly spins a brown sack around himself, after which he is shown inside the black sack, and he grows tired and falls asleep. The next picture shows Squiggly waking up as a butterfly. Using color and these particular pictures enables a child to learn about the stages that a caterpillar goes through before he becomes a beautiful butterfly. I feel that both techniques used to teach color and pictures showing a caterpillar's development process, are both highly effective in teaching child readers. The interactive portion of this book also appeals to children because they can participate in the book as they read it.