2018 Book #2 - Snow Babies

Snow Babies, by Laura Ellen Anderson, is a board book about animals in the snow. It has simple text like "Roly-poly polar bear cubs play," with each set of pages designated for a different animal.

The animals included are polar bears, reindeer, beavers, arctic foxes, arctic hares, huskies, penguins, snow leopards, snowy owls, wolves, harp seals, and pandas.

I really liked how they used the full names of the animals, such as harp seals instead of just seals. The baby animal names are also used for each animal. I think this is a great book for teaching kids about some different baby animal names in addition to some of the more common ones out there.

The verbs paired with each type of animal is something that animal would typically do in the wild and could lend themselves to more conversation with a child on each page.

The illustrations are cute but somewhat realistic looking.

Arctic fox cubs

I did think the final animal, the panda, didn't seem to fit in with others since they are mainly arctic or tundra animals and pandas are not. It seemed really random.

Overall, though, I thought the book was really cute and simple enough to hold really young children's attention, but I also really appreciated that they didn't completely dumb down the vocabulary in the book.