Minki's Day (Word Banks: Learning Words With Monsters)

PreSchool-Grade 1-Two bright, colorful, but unmemorable picture books. Minki's Day features a green monster that goes through his day with clocks on the right to reflect what time various events described on the left occur. For example, the rhyme, At eight-o'clock, still clean and neat,/breakfast was ready so I sat down to eat faces a fried-egg clock showing the time of 8:00. In Zeebo's Numbers, a purple creature describes his body parts using numbers from 1 to 10. He has six arms, four ears, and seven fingers on each of his hands. However, he is neither interesting nor amusing. He is a simply drawn character with stick-figure-like doodled features and a perpetual smile. Denise Fleming's The Everything Book (Holt) and Jules Older's Telling Time (Charlesbridge, both 2000) cover the subjects more effectively.