Alphabet Adventures: Book Recommendations for Learning the Alphabet

From soup to nuts, the letters of the alphabet can be found almost anywhere you look. These ingenious authors and illustrators present an adventurous tour of the alphabet through letters, language, and clever illustration.

Talk to Me About the Alphabet
Ages: Infant - 3 yrs.
By Chris Raschka
Henry Holt, $16.95 (Hardcover)

Here, exuberantly imaginative author/illustrator Chris Raschka, turns his attention to the ABCs, presenting readers an alphabet with attitude. The attitude belongs to the funny and dynamically-drawn brown-suited velocipede-riding gent who directly addresses the reader with humor in illustration and text.

The Circus Alphabet
Ages: Infant - 3 yrs.
By Linda Bronson
Henry Holt, $15.95 (Hardcover)

The 3-dimensional art in this colorful book is delightful. Bronson builds her illustrations using clay, wallpaper fabric, cottonballs, shiny fabrics, and tassels. She adds paint and a fine design sense to create highly imaginative circus pictures. The text is a whimsical sentence for each letter.

Zoopa, An Animal Alphabet
Ages: 3 - 6 yrs.
By Gianna Marina
Chronicle Books, $14.95 (Hardcover)

This playful book is designed as an interactive game about a bowl of soup-- alphabet, of course. Each illustration introduces one or more new letter-appropriate animals for young readers to identify and track through the pages as they change position on the page and engage in running gag activities. The soup bowl fills with letters and the new animals bound onto the pages, until all twenty-six are represented.    

Alphaboat
Ages: 4 - 8 yrs.
By Michael Chesworth
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $16 (Hardcover)

Alphaboat is an Xtraordinary romp with language, tremNdously funnE and original. The story is a hunt for the lost treasure left by Mister E for his Miss Mellow D; the ship’s crew is letters ("the officers are uppercase") who raise their "n r g" and do their work on the "double, you!" Question and exclamation marks become part of the play and, once the treasure "I-land" is found, there is a friendly "L O" and "blue J's" fly. The treasure? A dictionary. The jewels? The words "gold," "silver," etc. Chesworth's lovely watercolor/pen and ink art is hilarious, depicting the text and adding many more jokes, such as the letter "d" beneath the waves with the bubble comment, "I am the subtext."

The crew has to return briefly to the island to pick up the silent “e” they've left behind and then make its way through a "nasty scrawl" and past such geographical locations as "Sands Serif" and "Pencilvania." Readers will cheer as the triumphant crew is rewarded with "apos-trophy."

Amelia to Zora: Twenty-Six Women Who Changed the World
Ages: 4 - 8 yrs.
By Cynthia Chin-Lee, Illustrated by Megan Halsey and Sean Addy
Charlesbridge, $15.95 (Hardcover)

Here the alphabet provides the structure for a salute to remarkable women. Many are well known: Jane Goodall, Oprah, Helen Keller, Rachel Carson. Others are revelations, like Quah Ah, a Pueblo painter, and Nawal El Sadaawi, an Egyptian doctor and writer. The stories are stirring pieces of history. The prose is for children who read well by themselves. Each woman has her own well-designed page (a room of her own) and very imaginative, mixed-media illustrations.