Whoosh Around the Mulberry Bush by Jan Ormerod and Lindsey Gardiner

Whoosh Around the Mulberry Bush by Jan Ormerod and Lindsey Gardiner
Buy Whoosh Around the Mulberry Bush by Jan Ormerod and Lindsey Gardiner at Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com
Category: For Sharing
Reviewer: Magda Healey
Summary: An excellent little book, a great blend of words and pictures, fun actions to do and educational opportunities. Particularly recommended for playgroups and nurseries, but good for all children from about 1.5 to 3.
Buy? Yes	Borrow? Yes
Pages: 32	Date: February 2007
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 978-0192791726
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Whoosh Around the Mulberry Bush takes the old and well loved children's song as a starting point and continues the theme and pattern throughout different locations round the world, with a variety animals doing the whooshing and dancing. Garden insects and snails slime along round the flower bed on a sweetly smelling morning, and savannah animals suck and slurp, wallow in mud (...) round the waterhole on a dry and dusty morning.

The illustrations are great: colourful, eye catching and very, very dynamic. The running, whooshing and dancing is expressed with swinging tails, flapping wings and waves in the sea, and the animals are a cross between colourful cartoon-drawn live creatures and rag-doll type cuddly toys. There isn't too much background detail, but enough interest to keep children looking - that is, if they can manage to sit down and look instead of dancing and bouncing around.

Each page-spread introduces a different habitat, from the familiar (garden, farm) to exotic (deep sea, jungle, desert), with matching animals and features. Each rhyme introduces a number of onomatopoeic and movement-related words. All this provides plenty of educational opportunities: from the discussion of natural life (where do giraffes live? what lives on the sea shore? is it dry or wet, hot or cold in the jungle?) to the introduction of new words, especially for movement and of course the excellent potential for developing various "actions" that go with every page. I have to say that I can hardly sit down and type these words and am very tempted to see how to mime dig and dive, scuttle and crawl, nip and pinch or flip our fins, swim and swoop, dart and dive.

The rhythm of the original tune is kept well, occasionally even with slight loss of coherence , but I think in this case it's more important to keep the whole text singable and in meter.

Whoosh Around the Mulberry Bush is an excellent little book, a great blend of words and pictures; fun and educational opportunities. Recommended for all children from about 1.5 to 3, maybe 4 years old. I would particularly recommend it for nurseries, playgroups, childminders with a few toddlers/pre-schoolers and anybody who has several children to engage and entertain. There is a version with a CD, which I didn't have a chance to try, but the tune is well known and can be just sang out. So far, I hadn't see a "giant" version, but if it appears, it would be worth buying for a larger group, though both pictures and fonts in the normal size book are large enough to be visible from some distance. After few applications you are likely to know it by heart anyway!

Thanks to the publisher for sending us this great book!

Rattletrap Car is another book for the little ones with a lot of onomatopoeic words and great rhythm, and There Was An Old Lady Who Swallowed A Fly is another excellent variation on an old children's folk song.

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You can read more book reviews or buy Whoosh Around the Mulberry Bush by Jan Ormerod and Lindsey Gardiner at Amazon.co.uk Amazon currently charges £2.99 for standard delivery for orders under £20, over which delivery is free.
You can read more book reviews or buy Whoosh Around the Mulberry Bush by Jan Ormerod and Lindsey Gardiner at Amazon.com.

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