ABC Animals! will really move pre-K alphabet learners

ABC Animals! is a book whose friends are your old school baseball cards, some children’s lunchboxes and the recent release Jungle. It’s a Scanimation Picture Book by author Rufus Butler Seder, author of the #1 New York Times Bestseller Gallop! This teaches young kids the alphabet by using animals, nothing new there, it’s the Scanimation process that will make ABC Animals! a book that your 2-6 year old will enjoy looking at.

There is nothing special when you look at the cover of ABC Animals! You see an alligator who is shown with alternating black and white bars. Even when you pick up the book and move it from side to side you don’t see anything different.  The magic and true purpose of the book happens when you open the cover.

The alligator crawls and opens his mouth. If you close the cover the alligator walks backwards while still moving his mouth. Open the book really fast and it looks like the alligator is running. The rest of the pages in ABC Animals! work that way too.

On each page there are four animals, each one representing a letter from the alphabet who fly, trot, gallop, swim, slither or run on their exercise wheel. The animals on the pages don’t move if you look at the book from a different angle or twist the entire book from side to side.

You’ve got to physically turn the page in order to get the animals to do their stuff. The old school Scanimation that I was familiar with and even that used in Jungle, allowed people to get the effect simply by getting a different angle on the book.

ABC Animals! is an early education book for children that will have them jazzed about learning the alphabet. The interior pages of the book are on cardboard and will withstand casual to daily use. While the exterior and more importantly, the spine of the book is on thick cardboard. This is important because alphabet books take a beating and the first thing to go is usually the spine.  Based on the numerous books that we’ve had to recycle due to corrupted spines we can say that this is a book that will last you for years; assuming normal usage, not reading it in the pool or having an elephant trample on it.

Our 5 year old, who for the most part knows his alphabet, loves this book. His older brother is a young reader and liked looking at ABC Animals! once or twice to see the animals move. The sweet spot for this book is ages 1-6, that way it’ll serve as a learning and review tool for kids who need to get moving on their alphabet.