In the same way that baby animals stop whatever they are doing and close their eyes for the night, so a child must finally go to sleep when bedtime comes.
Summary: As night is approaching, adult animals gather their young and prepare them for bedtime. The animals included in this book are deer, owls, bears, squirrels, birds, mice, and rabbits. The story even involves the bed time of the reader by the end of the book.
Text and image: The text in this book is simple, which makes it an easy read for late emergent and early readers. The illustrations of the book are amazing. They are full of color and wonderfully depict the animals and their bed time rituals. The images make it easy for readers to decode the text because they actually are showing what is happening with the animals and their bed times.
Literary Devices: personification (animals are given bed times just like children)
A very sweet rhyming bedtime story for even the youngest of babies. Each of the animal parents tells the children, in its own way, that it's time for bed. "Hopping bunnies, hop, hop, hop. Stop your hopping, stop, stop, stop! Stars are dancing in the skies, Goodnight bunnies close your eyes!" However, the owl parent is just rousing its young from a good day's sleep. After all the little ones are encouraged to go to bed (or get up) there are two wordless pages that show the animals settling down. Then the next page shows the parents asking the reader, "What about You, sleepyhead? Guess whose turn it is for bed!" And the last page shows a child snuggling in bed, surrounded by stuffed animals. The colorful and charming illustrations make this a good book to add to the bedtime story stack.
This story was a bit too wordy for my Family Story Time group, especially for the younger ones, so I made Ellison die cut felt animals for each attendee I passed them out and asked them to listen for the animal they had in their hand as I read, then bring their animal up to my flannel board. Made this book more interactive for the whole group.
I like the art and the rhyme. All the animals tell their babies that it's time to go to bed. At the end of the book the little boy's bed is covered with the stuffed animals from the story. Cute.
Brought this home for SS from a suggested list of bedtime books. I love the illustrator's work. SS liked it when we first began it in our stack of books. Slowly weeded it out so we could have a smaller stack, but it is available for Family Story still. I think SD may have looked at it already.