The Bush Concert, written and illustrated by Helga Vissre, Omnibus Books for Scholastic Australia. ISBN 9781862918863
A copy of this book was sent to us from the publisher.
There’s a terrible drought in the bush and the birds decide to put on a concert to cheer themselves up.
It hadn’t rained for a very long time.
Food and water were hard to find.
Everyone was feeling low.
What could they do? Where could they go?
The birds get dressed up and put on a show. There’s music, singing and dancing, clowning, acrobatics and a lot more. And the concert ends with the perfect finale …
You’ve probably read a few stories about the bush that feature Australian animals. In this rhyming picture book, the story is about Australian birds. The detailed and colourful illustrations are in ink and pastels and show a wide variety of birds—pelicans, penguins, an emu, galahs and many many more. At the end of the book there is an illustrated glossary of the birds in the book. All 171 of them! Test your knowledge of Australian birds—how many can you name?
One book that we continue to pull out since my eldest daughter was little is The Nativity, illustrated by Julie Vivas. It uses text from the Authorised King James Version of the Bible to tell the Christmas story and the illustrations really glow and make this a wonderful book. (You might know her illustrations from other books, like Possum Magic, Wilfrid Gordon McDonald Partridge and Our Granny, or many others!)
We love this book and we never get tired of the fun CD, and of course, the twelve days of Christmas aren’t over until Epiphany, so we can keep listening until well after Christmas! (This was published in the UK and my children seem to think that the twelfth day should be ‘Drummers drumming’ and not ‘Lords-a-leaping’, but I don’t know if this is an Australian preference or a Newman-children preference. If we’re singing it along with a piano we go with my children’s preference, but we respect the CD version when we’ve got that on!)
The Twelve Dogs of Christmas by Kevin Whitlark arrived in our house just before December and (you guessed it) is a silly version of ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’ and full of all kinds of dogs doing doggy things. We like to sing ‘Three French Poodles, Two chewed up slippers, and a fat cat in a fur treeeeeee’ very loudly. If you love dogs (and Christmas carols), you will love this picture book. It really is very silly but it’s good fun and has been read quite a few times since it first arrived.
alphabetsoup.net.au 