Apples Are Red/La manzana es roja: Bilingual Board Book

Toddler-PreS—A trio of bilingual concept board books introduce the youngest listeners to numbers, colors, and food in English and Spanish. All three books share a similar format of brightly colored cut-paper illustrations and pages in increasingly larger sizes. In the numbers book, the incremental increase in the page size helps to emphasize the growing numbers. The only word used is the Spanish números (numbers), then each spread has an image and its corresponding numeral, followed by an equal number of dots. As the numbers are not spelled out, it has to be assumed that adult readers will already be familiar with both languages. In the colors title, both languages accompany the illustrations on each spread (orange/anaranjado for pumpkin, yellow/amarillo for chicks, and so on). The last page, black/negro, is a rather vibrant page incorporating all of the objects from the previous pages in a night scene. Apples Are Red/La manzana es roja introduces food and colors. While the color for each food is written out in English on the corresponding page, the Spanish equivalent appears on the inside front cover and cleverly matches up as the graduated pages turn. Most of the color/food combinations are appropriate except for black. An English-speaking child might not have trouble making the leap from blackberry to the color black, but a Spanish-speaking child might not see how a fruit that is in fact dark purple is characterized as black.