Product Description

A joyful celebration of a child's growing self-awareness. This classic children's book is a teacher's favorite, with outstanding illustrations by Don Wood.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #21152 in Books
• Published on: 1982-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 32 pages

Amazon.com Review
"I'm as quick as a cricket, I'm as slow as a snail. I'm as small as an ant, I'm as large as a whale." Parents and teachers choose this big square book for the message of self-confidence. Toddlers love it for the singsong phrases and Don Wood's large, silly, endearing illustrations, which feature a boy mimicking different kinds of animals. At one point, he is pictured sipping tea formally with a fancy poodle ("I'm as tame as a poodle") and on the very next page he is swinging through trees ("I'm as wild as a chimp"). Whether brave or shy, strong or weak, in the end the young boy celebrates all different, apparently contradictory parts of himself. With a confident grin, he lifts his arms up and declares, "Put it all together and you've got ME!" (Baby to age 6)

Review
This board book edition is new, although the soft and hard cover versions, published in 1982, have been extensively reviewed, and have sold over 1,000,000 copies. -- From the publisher

From the Publisher
Because Mrs. Honey's dream is so much like the dreams we really have, it will encourage children to talk about their own dreams. We can help them to see that the bizarre series of events that often characterize their dreams is actually quite typical of dreaming. The common elements of dreaming, flying, falling, being trapped, drowning, incongruous circumstances and waking suddenly in the middle of a crisis, are all part of Mrs. Honey's dream.

Mrs. Honey's cat, Thomas, knows what happened to the dream pirates - they got rid of them by waking up. Children should always be reassured of that, as real and often overwhelming and frightening as dreams may seem, they exist only in our minds and are gone when we wake. At the same time, exploring links between our dreams and our feelings can be fun and can help us to understand ourselves better.

Suggest that children make up their own dream-like story and enter it in the "Dream a story Competition" described at the end of the book.

Children will like the colourful vocabulary. Words like, "enormous, glaring, rabble, rigging, cutlasses, bellowed, sneered, and collapsed" show the respect Child's Play has for children's capacity to enjoy and use a high quality of language.

Customer Reviews

Beautifully illustrated, wonderfully written
This rhyming children's book is terrific toddler reading. The drawings are beautiful and our kids have both loved it. Our two year old loves the animal illustrations and verses. A great pick!

Get the biggest Cricket
We recently ordered 5 copies of Quick as a Cricket for our grandson and as gifts for other children. Our kids grew up with this book and it is timeless. All the copies we ordered were paperback but one arrived supersized. The pages are 15 x17 which is wonderful. The pages of the smaller books are 6x6. Both sizes have their uses but we really enjoy the wonderful illustrations in the larger format.

Creative Illustrations and Story!!!
My children love this book (they are 5, 3 and 1). The illustrations are amazing and the words are few, but very creative. It's very fun to immitate the pages as well.