Bronxtones

August 14, 2020

PreS-K-These informational, bilingual board books offer a taste of shapes and colors. Children are challenged to think outside the box. The texts use color-coded words to identify the names of shapes and colors. The three-line paragraphs feature medium-sized font in black type. Vivid, close-up photographs depict flowers, places, objects, and children and adults of color from the Bronx. Throughout the text, readers are invited to make connections between objects and places that resemble shapes as well as recognize the colors that appear in their daily lives. These board books may be used in an interactive preschool story time or as part of a kindergarten unit covering shapes and colors. VERDICT These bilingual board books showcase vibrant photographs and effortless narratives, which will help young children identify what they see in their everyday lives and strengthen early knowledge of geometry and colors.-Kathia Ibacache, Univ. of Colorado Boulder

Copyright 2020 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 15, 2020
A photographer born and resident in the Bronx offers glimpses of his borough's places and people. Rivera styles himself "The Bronxer" on his website and social media. Though only some of the captions ("Bruckner Orange," "174th Violet") place his eight sunny but generic outdoor scenes in any specific locale, still the cute young children of color in most of them supply plenty of charisma. In a bilingual narrative on each recto, equally generic English lines over Spanish highlight colors in the facing photo with changes of hue: "We buy tamales from the green cart. / Compramos tamales del carrito verde." An intrusive white Polaroid-style frame collaged into each photo serves no evident purpose beyond framing one element of the composition and supplying a place for a caption, brand emblem, and an ID number. This gives this board-book minigallery a commercial feel...but it's never a bad thing to celebrate the fact that there's more to New York City's northerly reaches than a zoo and a baseball stadium. More tribute than tour, but diapered viewers, Bronxers or not, will respond to the bright colors and faces. (Board book. 1-3)

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February 1, 2021
Preschool Little ones can follow along in this lively board book as children have fun after school in the Bronx. After changing into more comfortable clothes, they buy an afternoon snack of tamales and a pineapple icy for dessert, enjoying themselves as they blow bubbles and skip and jump. Readers will find large, colorful photographs of places in the Bronx and of real children having fun as they play. Each double-page spread contains one large colorful photograph on one side, a white, polaroid-like graphic framing an object of a particular color. On the opposite page, two sentences are included in large, clear text--one in English, one in Spanish. An excellent bilingual primer for learning about colors and practicing reading in both languages, especially recommended for families who love their board books with vibrant photographs of actual locations.

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