The Snail and the Whale
Wanting to sail beyond its rock, a tiny snail hitches a ride on a big humpback whale and then is able to help the whale when it gets stuck in the sand.
Stats for nerds
8recommend
9mentions
9people
2015–2026years
89% recommend11% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I recently discovered Shinsuke Yoshitake:
"I won't give up my rubber band" is a sweet, imaginative, thoughtful exploration of the thing we get attached to in our lives. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58739625-i-won-t-give-up...
"I wonder where I am" is a exploration of maps in various forms, a bit over my 2.5 year old's cognitive abilities, but I think it's great. Can't wait until he's able to get it.: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/204810909-i-wonder-where...
The books from Julia Donaldsson are classics. I am partial to Gozzle:
Gozzle https://www.amazon.co.uk/Gozzle-Julia-Donaldson/dp/152907641...
The snail and the whale: https://www.amazon.com/Snail-Whale-Julia-Donaldson/dp/150983...
My kid had a loooong "The hospital dog" phase: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Hospital-Dog-Julia-Donaldson/dp/150...
I skipped some of the native romanian books we read since there are no known translations that I am aware of. One of the main reasons I want to teach my toddler english is so that we can appreciate a wider selection of books, because there are many books not translated in Romanian.
I also noticed that the quality of the translation matter immensely, probably more than for normal books. And a lot of books just don't translate all that well because they rely on rimes or alliterations.
- Personally not really using AI directly with our kids but perhaps I can provide some insight to some areas. I've formally studied child language acquisition and have a toddler learning to read.
Early childhood development and storybooks is all over the place. The most successful books for kids are typically created by well-informed individuals or artist/writer combos who are better at the creative side than the education side but they're still pretty good at both.
The work of Julia Donaldson stands out as a leader in the field. She's responsible for the Gruffalo, The Snail and the Whale, Tiddler, and loads more. She's also got a series called Songbirds that are far more basic in their prose, but designed for early reading education. It's in those books that you'll see more method to the madness, with themed consonant and vowel pairings to hammer home elemental lessons for the youngest minds.
AI is chewing up a vast corpus of data that may contain snippets, tracts, or entire children's books, as well as studies and advice on child education. Its output will be a best match guess at what you prompt it, but it is unlikely to be a focussed educational tool like the Songbirds series is. Simply put: AI's strength will be a quick creative story crafted to a child's personal interests that can compete with even the most popular storybooks, but it might lack the nuance of stage-specific educational content.
That being said prompts can go a long way if you're prepared to do your own research and structure your instructions to narrow the output enough.
Another thing to be careful about is the pragmatic information in source data that will lack the weightings the AI needs to use appropriately. Things like dialect. If you use a storybook to teach vocabulary and pronunciation you can run into spelling and rhyming issues and more. We're British and read books from US relatives to our toddler and a book about Maine might try rhyming "on" with "dawn". In the UK that makes mum and dad sound like a rural country type from the South East, which neither of us are. The AI will be aware of phonetics, but is unlikely to weight it highly enough to produce your accent-specific rhymes, especially if they're not standard.
Another trap is to actually craft your kid's content to their interests, at least early on. Creative content is better opening their experience up as broadly as possible. But that's easy to mitigate. If they like dinosaurs, but their book on counting features mermaids, then use AI to make a dino-themed counting book. Just don't make everything dino-themed.
Extra aside - bedtime stories purposefully feature themes around sleep, contain more 'shhh' sounds, and repetitive sequences. Quite literally designed to send kids to sleep. But that muddies the AI waters when you want an output that engages the reader for educational purposes.
- A couple of other great kid/parent shows:
- Hilda on Netflix - more appropriate for 9+ year olds but my 5 year old loves it. Has some genuinely scary moments though especially the later seasons - The Gruffalo, Stick Man, Snail and the Whale, etc - based on the books - Avatar the Last Airbender - for older kids but has one of the best character arcs
- Love the shout-out to "The Snail and the Whale"--it's one of our family's favorite books! (As is anything else by Julia Donaldson.)
- They hitch a ride on a whale’s tail of course.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Snail_and_the_Whale
(Of course I’m just kidding but it’s a great book)
- This is very true. I have the same response to many (but not all) Julia Donaldson books. I could happily read the Snail and the Whale every night to my kids. My son loved them all, but for some reason my daughter never took to them and it's always made me a bit sad that I don't get to read them to her.
