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Rating: 
Summary: You will LOVE this book!
Review: My 3 year old is crazy about this book! The story (tune) is easy for him to sing along with, and the pictures are adorable. They really tell the story. There is so much detail to the pictures that we can spend lots of time on each page - "do you see where the balloon went this time?" "what is the elephant doing now?". I also absolutely love it that there are very diverse children in the book - even a little girl in a wheelchair. This is now one of my regular "gift" books for all new babies, too.
Rating:
Summary: Theo Learn to Sing with this Book
Review: My little 2 year old boy loves trains, loves animals and loves music with strong rhythms. This book is three for three. Reading it with him produced his first real singing. I'd sing a stanza and leave out the last word, he'd fill it in, and one day he just kept going. Wow. The animals are mischievous, the kids at the Childrens' Zoo diverse and the "I'll save the day" zookeeper is a woman. By the way, all the animal parents look totally relaxed about their kiddies going off to school, my son was most concerned about the fact that the Mommie elephant dropped the stop sign - "Oh nooooo!"
Rating: 
Summary: I'm reading more into this than other people, I guess
Review: My son loves trains and I collect train books to read to him. Due to the rave reviews I'd read here and at another source, I purchased this book. What none of the reviews said is this: the storyline is that train driven by humans goes around picking up baby animals while the parents wave goodbye to them. They go to a "children's zoo" and a schoolbus and school teacher arrive with young human children. They all play together, that is the end. I guess I don't understand why the baby animals are being taken away from their famiies. All I could think of was that this is like preparing our children to separate from parents, as in, going to daycare. I don't like the emphasis on the separation. I do understand why the children are in school, obviously to get an education. To me this is a message to the children I am reading this book to: that human children should be separating from their parents and spending the day with other similarly aged children. I would have preferred to see animals in general getting on the train, or the human children getting on the train to go a normal zoo with the usual animal families. I enjoy books where the family unit is intact and where the parents are happily interacting with their children. I also don't like that one baby animal carries a "lovey" blanket and one boy does also. I just don't like "lovey" objects as they are usually initiated by the parent as a way for the baby or young child to provide nighttime comfort and to self-soothe with (when the parent is not co-sleeping to provide the historically normal parenting comfort). Animals all sleep together (as many humans do) so I especially am bothered by that illustration of the baby animal with a "lovey". A side note, I am not interested in the school association as I am homeschooling. Not everyone sends their children to school and not every child rides on a big yellow schoolbus! Couldn't the entire family be visiting the animals in the zoo rather than making this associated with separating the human children from their parents (even if it is to go to public school)? The words are fun and my son does love this book. It is the underlying message that I don't agree with.
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