Blue Hat, Green Hat

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Wonderful - Rated
Quite possibly the funniest book ever written. Buy it for anyone who needs cheering up, regardless of whether or not they've got a toddler to read it to. Silly, simple - sublime!

Read to Your Child to Develop Bonding and Intellect! - Rated
Researchers constantly find that reading to children is valuable in a variety of ways, not least of which are instilling a love of reading and improved reading skills. With better parent-child bonding from reading, your child will also be more emotionally secure and able to relate better to others. Intellectual performance will expand as well. Spending time together watching television fails as a substitute.

To help other parents apply this advice, as a parent of four I consulted an expert, our youngest child, and asked her to share with me her favorite books that were read to her as a young child. Blue Hat, Green Hat was one of her picks.

Although ostensibly about colors, this book is subtly about much more. Clothes are put on an elephant, a bear, a moose, and a turkey. As you can imagine, putting clothes on a turkey is a challenge. So the turkey always has the clothes on in some strange way (shirt around tail feathers but not on legs, hat on the feet, pants around head and chest, socks on front feathers, coat on beak, etc.). That is a wonderful way to teach you child the word "oops" and to associate doing something unusual with fun. What a great preparation for mistakes later in life!

All of the pictures are pretty silly, so you will engage your child's sense of the ridiculous. For example, the elephant, bear and moose are standing on their hands when wearing colored pants.

For help with learning the colors, each sequence has the colors in a different order. That makes learning a greater challenge and more interesting.

By sticking with few colors and many situations, the task of learning is made manageable for the child. Since the story is short, it also matches a child's attention span.

Overcome your misconception stall that young children are not ready for humor and book learning!

Enjoy!

Ridiculous and brilliant - Rated
My 15 month old is addicted to this book. She whoops with laughter at the "oops" on each page. It has also taught her lots of new words to do with clothing, and will no doubt be useful in future for teaching her colours. Best of all, she has developed a real sense of the ridiculous.

Fun for little ones - Rated
I have to start with a confession - I don't like this book! Sandra Boynton writes such great books that this one was a disappointment - I just don't find it very creative, or interesting. So why did I give it 4 stars? My two-year old LOVES IT! He laughs and laughs everytime we read it, and loves pointing out the different color pants, shirt, hat or whatever is on a given page. It's one of his favorites.

Awesome! - Rated
This was my all time favorite book to read with my children. The simplicity of the humor in this book is very enjoyable. We love the silly turkey that just can't get it right, and even when he does get it right, gets it wrong. We always referred to this book as the "Oops book." Even if a child has no reading skills whatsoever, they will enjoy "reading" the oops part every 2 pages. I highly reccomend it!