Time for Bed
A teacher’s look at why this book belongs in the Lap Listeners stage.
Why it fits Lap Listeners (for babies in their first year, when books are about your voice, not the plot)
A gentle lullaby in couplets, pairing each baby animal with its parent. The rhyme scheme is so regular that babies settle into it like a rocking chair. Ideal as the final book of the night.
What makes it special
It works like a spell: every couplet lowers the temperature of the room a little further. Jane Dyer's soft watercolors of drowsy animal parents and babies are painted in actual twilight tones, so the book itself seems to get sleepier. As an antidote to overstimulated evenings, few objects in the house work as reliably.
From the publisher
Darkness is falling and everywhere little ones are growing sleepy and being tucked into bed. Sleep…
About Mem Fox
Mem Fox is Australia's best-known picture-book author and spent 24 years as an associate professor of literacy education — her books are engineered, syllable by syllable, from what she taught about how children acquire language. Reading Magic, her guide for parents, is a modern classic on reading aloud.
Raised in Zimbabwe by missionary parents, Fox wrote her first book, Possum Magic, as a college assignment; it was rejected nine times, then became the best-selling Australian children's book in history.
Also by this author: Possum Magic · Where Is the Green Sheep? · Koala Lou
More from “Sing It, Say It Again”
This book is part of The Best Books for Babies: 30 Teacher Picks (Lap Listeners) in our guide The Best Children’s Books by Age — 120 books chosen by the Montessori-certified teachers at Creative Minds Montessori in Frisco, TX. Come see how we build readers →
Nobody paid for this review — not the author, not the publisher — and the store link above earns us nothing. Our only interest is the reader this book fits.