Customer Reviews

Here Comes Mother Goose (My Very First Mother Goose)

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I loved Here Comes Mother Goose. My 11 year old daughter loved it too. Rosemary Wells is so clever, mixing up the what little boys and what little girls are made up was wonderful! The art and characters are what make this book standout for us. The ryhme selection also is great - the rhymes with violence have been skipped, nice for a change. We have both collections now and have given many as gifts.

Going strictly on my three preschoolers' (ages 5, 3, and 1)preferences, we honestly can't recommend Here Comes Mother Goose. We have spent countless hours reading/singing (and taping and repairing) Opie/Wells' first book, My Very First Mother Goose. But Here Comes M.G. just doesn't resonate with my children in the same way. If you're trying to decide between the two, we whole-heartedly recommend My Very First Mother Goose - a much-loved favorite!

The book is wonderful...as to the comment about the editor's error on the "what are little girls and boy's made of"...I too originally thought it was an error. After a closer look I discovered pictures of cute little girls in pigtails playing with frogs and mud and cute little boys in chefs' hats baking and having a great time. A terrificly subtle blast at stereotypes...give the book to someone you love!

What a wonderful book! The text is classic and the illustrations are, of course, marvelous! To the disappointed reviewer who thought there was an error in the illustrations, you are incorrect! I just returned from a conference at which Ms. Wells spoke. The switch in the "what are little girls/boys made of" indeed was intentional on the part of the illustrator to stamp out those gender stereotypes! As Ms. Wells told us this weekend, "Mother Goose should be the Shakespeare of children's literature."! READ ON!

We bought this book for my son when he was around 15 months old. He would spend hours carrying this book from one person to the next, wanting it to be read over and over. The repetition, the rhyming, and the order of each chapter seemed to just resonate with him. He absolutely loved it and still does. He is almost five years old now and will still take it out of his collection for bedtime reading. It is a little young for his comprehension level now, but he loves to recite the rhymes and finds comfort in its familiarity. I recommend this book wholeheartedly, especially for ages one to three.

Why did she shorten a number of the poems/ditties? This reads like my radio scanning the first 10 seconds of each station. These poems were written with lots of verses, why not include them?

And I don't particularly enjoy the sanitizing of the What Are Little Boys Made Of poem. Why not read it in the original? Wouldn't it provide an interesting opportunity to discuss gender stereotypes to appropriately aged children, instead of dumbing it down for them?

I did like My Kindergarten, though.

Beautiful book, but most of the material is completely unfamiliar to me, and I expected it to be more common poems / nursery rhymes. I think I was looking for the other one by the same author

This has a fairly nice selection of rhymes, and the pictures are bright, but the pictures seem rather unrelated to the rhymes -
and for a child just learning to speak it seems important that
the pictures and the rhymes match. I was given a copy but I do
not read it to my 2-year-old. I much prefer the Orchard Book of
Nursery Rhymes which i found at the local library. (Why three stars and not fewer? Because I saw at the library many nursery rhyme books that were worse.)

These two Mother Goose books by Iona Opie (a true scholar on the the origin and wording of Mother Goose rhymes), with delightful illustrations by Rosemary Welles (My First Mother Goose, with a red cover, and Here Comes Mother Goose with a yellow cover), are the best presents you could give to new parents. These are beautiful books, with wonderful rhymes that children will want to hear over and over again. The colors are bright, the typeface clear and winning, and the illustrations are stunningly beautiful and engaging for children. I would frame every one of them. I'm a librarian, and these editions are the best Mother Goose rhymes around, and my own children and I read them over and over again when they were growing up. My kids are now in high school, and I've bought them their own editions to read to their own children later on.

The importance of nursery rhymes is that they get children ready to read--the children can understand the story through the pictures, and they memorize the words because the rhymes make the verse predictable after a while. Eventually, children can match the words with sounds they know. Nursery rhymes are not a "frill" but a crucial learning tool for children. Avoid the commercialism of Disney and other vendors, and reach for these books, which are really for children. You'll love the books yourselves.

I have two of the Rosemary Wells/Ione Opie Mother Goose books that we've enjoyed for many years. The pictures are large & colorful, and the poems are just the right size for younger listeners. This is the second time that I've bought the series after 10 years, as my kids loved them so much that they took them EVERYWHERE, and the books were worn out from too much loving. I like the mix of familiar & new-to-us rhymes, especially as my husband is British, and some that I didn't know were familiar to him. Great additions to a library!