Product Description

Mrs. Honey and her cat find themselves in each other's dreams. They fly and fall and fight off sharks with knitting needles. They almost drown and are rescued by sailors, attacked by pirates and saved by Mrs. Honey's cakes, only to end up walking the plank into the briny drink! And then...and then...they wake up! So, that's how you get rid of pirates!

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #127419 in Books
• Published on: 1997-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 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

My 20 month old son LOVES this book! 1st time mom at 44
My son eyes new books suspiciously - almost like I was trying to sneak a new child into the house without checking with him first. His books are a closed circle of friends and he loves the familiar, well worn pages that he can rattle off by heart. So I was amazed when he took to this book immediately and with gusto, rattling off the animal names within days. Quick as a cricket, slow as a snail, small as an ant, large as a whale, ...there are sad bassetts, happy larks, tame poodles, busy bees, lazy lizards, tough rhinos...you name it. This books has the essential ingredients for every toddler book - beautiful artwork, rhyme and rhythm to the words, and interesting characters to capture little imaginations. I love the Woods but not all their books are for tots this age since they can get a little bizarre sometimes. This ranks right up there in the book world the way Raffi does in the music world of toddlers!

Quick as a Cricket
This lovely book has won the heart of my 2 year old daughter. She requests the "cricket book" perhaps a little too often :-). I do really enjoy reading the quick paced, bouncy rhyming style of Audrey Wood. She is one of my favorite children's authors and with her husband Don Wood, they have created beautifully illustrated pages to go along with it. It is colorful, fun, interesting, and predictable enough so that the toddler can help you finish the sentences and join in the story FUN!

Big pictures, easy to understand
I love this book. My boys love this book. We read it on a daily basis multiple times. My 3 year old can practically read it to his little brother. I actually went to a short literacy class on books for children and they read this one as an example of a good selection. It is very simple with large pictures, but is great for introducing comparisons and adjectives. ("I'm as quick as a cricket") It's simplicity is appealing yet it also uses words that are a little less common in a preschooler's vocabulary. All around one of our favorites!