The perils of eating too much (Usborne Farmyard Tales: Pig Gets Stuck - Heather Amery)

Member Name: zerub

Product:	Usborne Farmyard Tales: Pig Gets Stuck - Heather Amery
Date:	31/03/09 (130 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: They like to laugh at the pig's bottom

Disadvantages: No tractors

This is one of the stories in the Usborne Farmyard Tales series. If your child likes it, there are dozens more! The first part of this review is about the series, and the second part about the particular book.

--- The series ---
The stories are about two children, their mum who is the farmer, and their dog, and what they get up to on the farm. The stories are short, and exciting (if you are three).

--- Learning to read ---
The clever thing about these stories is that they are written on two levels. At the top of each page is a short sentence, and at the bottom of the page is a couple of longer sentences. You can read the book by reading the top of each page, or the bottom, or both. If you read both there will be a little bit of overlap.

For example, the top of the page says "Curly is stuck."
And the bottom of the page says "Curly pushes and pushes but he can't move. He is stuck in the fence."

The point is that when your child starts to read, they can read the top of the page fairly easily and so have the pleasure of reading a much-loved story by themselves. Although it is entirely possible that you will have read the story so many times by then that they'll know the words by heart.

--- The pictures ---
The illustrations are quite detailed, so there is a lot to look at. My son pretty much knows the stories so he can sit and examine the pictures, and does so for quite long periods of time.

On each pages there is a small duck hiding somewhere - my children take great delight in hunting for and spotting the duck on each page.

--- The format ---
The book has 16 pages which is a good length for a 2-4 year-old's attention span. You can get them in several formats. I like the small ones - 14cm square books. They are small and light, which makes them very easy for a little child to hold and carry around. Most children's picture books are very big (so you can get a lot of good pictures in!) but these are child-sized. They're good for taking on holiday too - plenty of stories but not too much suitcase room.

--- The price ---
It costs £3.99, although I would recommend buying a few in a set and getting them cheaper that way.

--- Pig Gets Stuck ---
This story is about the six pigs who live on the farm, and in particular, about the smallest pig, who is called Curly. Children often like stories about "the smallest one" - I think they identify with being small and not quite able to do things.

Poor Curly doesn't manage to get any breakfast, so he escapes from the pen, to look for something to eat. An adventure already, and we're only on page 3. The "adventures" in these stories are very very gentle, which is right for the age range.

We like the next double page - it has pictures of all the different animals on the farm, with their food, and the text asks us "Which breakfast would he like to eat?". Cue a bit of a discussion about how the cow's hay doesn't look that great and we'd rather have a bacon sandwich. I thought about asking the child that said this if he knew where bacon came from, but decided to leave that for another time - perhaps when we weren't reading a story about cute little piggy-wiggies!

Curly chooses the hen's breakfast, eats it all up, and then is too big to squeeze back out of the gap that he came in by. The pictures of the pig's bottom poking through the fence seem to be greatly entertaining.

When he gets free, Mrs Boot makes a fuss of him and promises that he will never be hungry again. Aaaah.

This isn't one of our favourites because of the lack of tractors, but it gets chosen fairly regularly.

Summary: Another good story in the series