Here Comes Mother Goose

Opie, I. (1999). Here Comes Mother Goose. Cambridge, MA: Candlewick Press.

Brief Annotation: This book is a collection of nursery rhymes segmented into four chapters: 1,2 Buckle My Shoe, Old Mother Hubbard, As I was going to St. Ives, and I Danced with the Girl. Animals personify each rhyme. Some rhymes are familiar, some are more in-depth version of familiar rhymes others are completely new. The imagery is young and playful and the text is large and simple. Although there is some challenging vocabulary, most of the text was simple and easy to interpret from the rhyming and the images.

Genre: Mother Goose

Grade Level: Pre-K to 3

Readers who will like this: Readers who enjoy short poems and readers who enjoy animal imagery would like this book. It really has poems for everyone whether you want to read a poem about getting married or Christopher Columbus. This would be a good book to read to young children before or as they are beginning to learn language. This book emphasized many different phonemes through rhymes. It also has an assortment of onomatopoeias. The short rhymes can increase a child’s vocabulary because they are likely to mimic and memorize the rhymes that they enjoy.

Response/Rating (1-4): 3. Some of the pictures for me were strange, especially the fruit heads in the Ole King Cole rhyme. I enjoyed finding similar pictures in different areas of the text, like the doll dressed in green and the sisters dressed in green later. Some of the unfamiliar rhymes didn’t make much sense to me, and they distracted me from the rhymes that I enjoyed.

One question you would ask before a read aloud: What is your favorite nursery rhyme?