Have You Ever Seen? by Sarah Mazor and illustrated by Abira Das, picture e-book, published by MazorBooks in 2018.

Auntie Lily has conjured up some very silly rhymes for the children before bedtime.

I believe that rhymes and rhythm are important for early literacy. Not only are they pleasant to listen to, they are also important for early speech development, and for reading and spelling later on. Silly rhymes are lots of fun and can even help to encourage reluctant readers to get involved. And Have You Ever Seen? is definitely full of silly rhymes.

For me, there were a few things that I struggled with when reading this book. Firstly, the presentation of the mobi. file I was reviewing was awful. The edges of the pages were cut-off, so I adjusted the page size so that I could read all of the text, but then each page of the book was spread across two pages on my reader, as well as being slightly distorted. This is one of the reasons why I prefer to read a physical book, especially in the case of picture books. Have You Ever Seen? is available as a physical book as well as the Kindle edition.

Reader difficulties aside, the story was going along fine until donkey was rhymed with monkey. Yes they both have the same finishing sound, but these words do not rhyme. And to me, an almost rhyme is worse than no rhyme. There were a few examples of this, such as swan and lawn, hippo and depot.

What exactly is the Yak spreading his ketchup on? I think it’s supposed to be a burger, possibly ‘mac’ refers to the fast food burger chain, but I think this rhyme is just forced. The dove “raining pee pee from above”, well, that is actually how birds pee, so this page didn’t really fit with the rest of the silly rhymes, unless the author just wanted to use the words “pee pee” for the laughs.

The rest of the rhymes were just the right sort of funny and silly. I liked the sheep sleeping in the melon and the goat gardening on a boat. The illustrations were quite nice too, capturing the text extremely well. The mouse was super cute, but my favourite picture was the dancing lion.

At the end of the Kindle edition there are a number of rhyme riddles for the kids to solve. This was a nice addition to the story, and a great way to get kids practicing their rhyming skills.

Have You Ever Seen? is suitable for preschool and lower primary school children.

 

*I received this book as a digital copy from the author, who asked me for an honest review of this book. I did not receive any other remuneration, and the review is composed entirely of my own opinions.