EDIT: Take a look at the Vaughan Public Libraries COLOURING PAGES. Each branch has its own colouring sheets that portray a distinctive feature of the library, and you can print out and colour them in via that link! We would love to see your completed colourings!
I haven’t really played spot-the-whatever games for a while now (probably since Where’s Waldo as a child, and even then not much), and whenever I have encountered them as an adult, I’ve found them to be a bit too easy to complete to truly engage with. This one though, is a treasure. Search and Spot: Animals! will keep you entertained (or frustrated) for maybe not quite hours, but at least a good half hour or so! And considering it’s a pretty slim book, I’d say it’s an amazing payoff. It really depends on how easily you can spot the animals, but I personally found it surprisingly difficult, which in turn made the experience surprisingly fun. I’d always get to, say, 9 out of 10 animals before having to start all over again because – fiddlesticks! I’ve gone through the entire 2-page spread, systematically, already! Or there’ll come a point where I start forgetting which of the insects I’ve found and which I haven’t, and, hey doesn’t this look like that insect? No, no, the pink part of its body is in another spot, and haven’t I already found it somewhere up here on the page? Now where’d that go?! Even the cover is a session of find-the-8-rabbits!
This is filed away under our junior section, but in light of the recent boom (or maybe not-so-recent? I don’t remember when those actually became popular…) of adult colouring books, I thought I should highlight these for all ages so we can satisfy our inner children!
If you don’t like animals (who are you?), Ljungkvist also has a Search and Spot: Go! edition full of vehicles, ranging from cars to trucks to a variety of other things that go, along with related objects such as traffic lights. I haven’t laid my hands on this one yet, but the animals edition was delightful beyond measure, and I cannot think of a single thing I would rather have done with however much time I spent immersed in that book. So there.
Ljungkvist also has another series called Follow the Line. And while I’m at it, I’m going to link you to the rest of her books in our collection as well: see Laura Ljungkvist.
Another really good interactive picture book author is Hervé Tullet, who has published books such as Press Here and Help! We Need a Title!. I don’t really remember picture books being quite this interactive in the first phase of my reading them (this being the second picture book phase), and the combination of colourful, multilayered and almost kaleidoscopic designs of Ljungkvist, coupled with the simple, playful nature of the book, is just perfect.
Find Momo is another lighthearted book with beautiful photographs you’ll lose yourself in… until you spot a friendly and familiar face: Momo! And apparently, if you’re a Torontonian or a Sudbury local (a Sudburian? Sudburyan?), you might just recognize some of the places featured in the book! That’s always exciting.
Does anyone else have interactive picture books they’d like to share? I would love to see recommendations based on this series! On my part, I’ll suggest the good old I Spy and Where’s Waldo.