A big city ABC

by Allan Moak

The city of Toronto is presented through pictures of its highlights, alphabetically, from airport, baseball, and castle to zoo.

Genres: Picture Books

32 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 1984

Reviews

[Gemma]

Cute tool to learn the ABCs and learn about Toronto.

[Della Bowens]

I was definitely not a fan of this ABC book by Allan Moak. The reading age for this book I think is early childhood up to kindergarten. It can possibly stretch to first grade. one of the issues I have with this book is the words the author uses. For example the author uses "Excavate" for E and "Yuletide" for Y. I am a 20 year old junior and even I had to figure out what the exact meaning and pronunciation for 'Yuletide" was. If I had issues, I know that young children would have issues as well. The author should have used better diction that was age appropriate. Even though there is pictures to describe the word, it didn't help. Another issue I had with this book is the illustrations. i thought the illustrations didn't fit the diction. Since the paintings were so childish, the diction should have been to. the author uses sophisticated diction with sloppy illustrations to parallel it.

[Sarah Prekopa]

"A Big City ABC" is a fun ABC book that "looks through the eyes of children" to see the wonderful city of Toronto, Canada. With nice illustrations and simple, child-friendly words, there is a nice "tour" of the city itself.

As someone who has never been to Toronto I learned many things! For example, there's a castle in the city and a popular science center. With words like "Rink" and "Winter", the reader can see that Toronto has different weather than here in Kentucky. This story would be a great tool to teach about Canada and how their big cities are a lot like ours even though they are a whole different country! "A Big City ABC" is a great way to teach about similarities and differences between countries and to focus on the similarities while celebrating the differences.