Wednesday, October 5, 2011

How to Build an A by Sara Midda

Ryan is into letters and numbers right now - he talks about them all the time. I bought this for him recently and it was an instant favourite.

I saw this in a store in Singapore (Motherworks at Great World City) and recalled reading a positive review about it on the internet, so I snapped it up. I assume you can get it at the usual bookstores too and, interestingly, it is also available at The Metropolitan Museum of Art Store.


The book comes with 11 sturdy foam pieces and a mesh bag to store the pieces in. As the title states, it shows you how to build an A (using the foam pieces). And a B and a C too. Every letter from A to Z in fact.


Hmm, I suppose even if you don't buy the book, you could make the pieces yourself? But then, you wouldn't have Midda's book with all her quirky illustrations! Each page introduces a new letter and is illustrated with Midda's miniature people, who are shown comically hauling and heaving the pieces into place. 

The only drawback is that the pieces don't fit together nicely. For example, for the letter 'B', the vertical piece isn't long enough to accommodate both of the semicircles. These have to be overlapped.


Nevertheless, once Ryan understood that it was not like a jigsaw and you could put one piece on top of another, he had no problems at all. He even built the lower-case letters (the book only shows how to build upper case letters)!



I usually do book reviews after we have been reading the book for a long time. This book, we have been reading for less than a month and I don't know how long it will be before it stays on the shelf for good. Nevertheless, I thought that I'd write about it because Ryan loves it so much, even if it is turns out that it is for just a while. Just last night Ryan took Richard by the hand and ordered him to build the letters with him. He told Richard, "A-B-C, You, Me!" Richard said it was the first sentence that Ryan had ever spoken to him!

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