Rating: 5 blind stars
This is a different type of children's book. It's a book-turned-guessing game, and your kids play along with the seven sight-impaired mice, who are trying to figure out what animal is near the watering hole.
One at a time, each mouse scurries around one part of the animal--on Monday, its toe; on Tuesday, its trunk; on Wednesday, its tusk, and so on. And then they guess what it is. Monday's mouse thinks it is a pillar while Tuesday's mouse is sure it's a snake but Wednesday's mouse believes it is a spear. The final mouse scurries along each and every part and declares, along with your kids: An elephant! The book doesn't end there. An additional page states: the morale of the story: "Knowing in part may make a fine tale, but wisdom comes from seeing the whole." What fine advice!
Ben and Lorelei have enjoyed this book, and it's a great book to read aloud. It helps that I am a ham; my hand became the mouse and I "scurried" up and down Lorelei and Ben's arms and legs and heads and made guesses about what I was touching each time, with my eyes closed, of course. It's a good book to read because there are so many ways to use it to make hypotheses, predictions, and guesses. It also could be an example of how to write a fable, something that I'm sure is a required activity in grade school...maybe second grade? It also teaches the days of the weeks and ordinal counting, so there's a lot of information within the pages of this book.I also have to brag here: this is the only book I've ever read in Thai. My reading is not so good, probably because the language is fun to speak but a bear to read and write. I can do it, but...as you can see children's books are all that I got through!
