Friday 6 July 2012

Title: The Great Nursery Rhyme Disaster
Author: David Conway
Illustrator: Melanie Williamson
First Published: Hodder Children's Books 2008
This Edition: Hodder Children's Books 2010
Found: Borrowed from library







What's it all about?

Miss Muffet is bored of her nursery rhyme and she has had quite enough of that scary spider that comes to sit down beside her. She decides that what she really needs is a change, so she's off to find another nursery rhyme to be in.
She wanders through the pages of the nursery rhyme book and stumbles across some of the most popular rhymes and characters. But during her search, things go from bad to worse when she manages to upset the dish in the "Hey Diddle Diddle" rhyme and chaos ensues...
Review:
I absolutely loved the whole idea! It's light, funny and an entertaining piece to read aloud.
Miss Muffet causes havoc and then returns to own rhyme but then along comes the spider and reminds her just why she wanted to be a different rhyme in the first place!

The pictures are wonderful; bold, bright and done to make you feel that you are following Miss Muffet through the pages of a nursery rhyme book. There are lovely additional details to the pictures that perhaps OJ didn't get, but then a child of around 5-6 years would. On each page there is an animal holding a sign directing the reader to the next page with funny little captions or clues to the next rhyme.

The language in the story is obviously based around the traditional nursery rhymes with Miss Muffet getting herself involved in it, which I thought was well done.

The text itself wasn't plain typed; there was variety in presentation of text. Examples of this include wavy, bold, swirled, varying font styles etc.

I think this book would work very well in reception class on a nursery rhyme topic and would be a engaging resource in encouraging children to use their imagination and creativity. My suggestion would be to encourage children to think of other nursery rhymes to mix up and then maybe produce a display board.

Over all, this was a very interesting book to share.

OJ.
OJ joined in with the rhymes that he knew and enjoyed telling me that the rhyme wasn't right with Miss Muffet in the middle of it!

"That's not right mum-mum!" - OJ commenting on  Miss Muffet marching with the Grand Old Duke...

Book worm rating:
out of 5

A wonderful addition to any picture book bookshelf!

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