Growl with the Animals! is a fun board book for older toddlers which features buttons with 10 different real animal sounds. Holly and Lara both found this book fascinating because it is factual and features noises with which they were not familiar.
Growl with the Animals! is most suited to Holly. Each board page is easy for her to turn without destroying the book because the top of each tab features one of the two animals featured on the double-page spread so this gives her something to grab onto.
Each double-page features between one and three facts about one of the animals - the pictures are a mixture of photographs and colourful creative backgrounds to set the scene. As you read through the page you can encourage your child to press the button that matches the animal pictures to hear the noise that they make - they can even try to copy the sound themselves!
Holly and Lara most enjoyed listening to the hyena laugh and the chirrup of the rainforest frog. Lara is at an age where she is really interested in "facts" and she was delighted to tell me all of the things that she had learned from this book such as why rainforest frogs are brightly coloured, and what you call a toucan's vibrant beak! As she chatters away to her little sister about the words in the book you can see that Holly is taking it all in and soaking up the knowledge too. I loved watching my two girls read this book together and repeatedly run through all of the different animal noises.
It is good to see a sound book for small people that offers something other than the normal farm animals or very basic "jungle" animals. My only complaint about this board book is the use of an image of an Orca to represent the sound for a page filled with whales where the next page is about dolphins...complicated. Try explaining the complexities of the mammal kingdom to a 3 year old.
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