O is for Ossicone, a fun alphabet board book to plant smart STEM seeds

Treat kids as intelligent as you want them to be. I have that belief when I teach and it’s how we’ve raised our two children so far. You might’ve heard the tale about the baby who had a toy piano in their crib since they were born and they grew up to be a world-renowned concert pianist. I have no idea if that’s true, it sounds like the sort of information that lives in fables, but it could also breed familiarity with something that might psyche kids out as they get older. Was the child already a prodigy and the fact that they were given that toy just a happy coincidence? O is for Ossicone is a board book. Board books are meant for babies. I didn’t know most of the content in O is for Ossicone. I am not a baby. The proceeding four sentences are 100% true.

The layout in O is for Ossicone is interactive on every page. Every page in this board book folds out or up, to reveal the full illustration of the animal that’s being profiled. The page that leads you to the fold-out is a close-up illustration of what the text will be the introduction.

For example, I see a large tusk, brown skin, and white fur that’s coming from a black snout. The text on the page says ‘V is for vibrissae’, I don’t know what vibrissae are, but the animal looks like a walrus. Then, once you fold out that page you’ll see the animal that you suspected was there with a couple of text blurbs around its bulbous body.

One of the arrows points to the blubber on the body and there are three others that have text with definition. You were correct in that one of them was a tusk, pat yourself on the back. The real show is the vibrissae, which are the hundreds of whiskers around its muzzle. The vibrissae are very sensitive and help them locate food that’s buried in the sand. O is for Ossicone says on that page that they’re otherwise known as whiskers, so why go through all that trouble for a board book?

Treat kids as intelligent as you want them to be. It’s that, plus O is for Ossicone is a STEM-based biology board book on the deeper end of the content pool. The setup for the letter and the scientifically named body part are simple. When kids turn the page they’ll be greeted with a happy illustration of an animal that they probably know, with facts that they don’t know and words that those who normally engage in board books can’t read.

It all depends on what age is reading the book, which is something that you can’t say for most board books. If the board book is being read to its traditional ages, say those who are three to five years old, then you people who are presenting the book need to dig deep and keep it interesting. Read the book as if it’s telling a story, because it is doing that, albeit a non-traditional one. When you do it that way it’ll naturally lead to conversations about the animals, which will lead to those young ages asking questions. Questions, even those that young kids will ask when they’re trying to avoid bedtime can be the stuff of magic when it comes to getting kids genuinely interested in a subject.

But this is not a traditional board book and the content in it is such that those smart kids who are outside of the board book realm can engage with. It’s not intimidating, because it’s a board book, and those who think that they’re too old for it will be shocked to realize that they might know 5% of the book’s information. Hopefully, they’ll gamely play along, read about the forked tongue, vaguely recall hearing about it in science class, and keep on reading.

O is for Ossicone is a fun book to read. Its illustrations and layout are engaging and will keep those younger kids interested. They’ll certainly be more interested if the person reading it hams up the presentation and talks about the animals too. That way it warms it up for them so that they can spend some alone time with the book and become those biologists who’ll save the world in 40 or 50 years.

O is for Ossicone: A Surprising Animal Alphabet is by Hannah Eliot with illustrations by Sarah Papworth and is available on Little Simon, an imprint of Simon & Schuster.

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