Brown Bear, Brown Bear

What Hacker News says

1. jacobolusMay 2021
   Brown Bear, Brown Bear is an excellent book for very young children (say, under 2 years old). It’s not a deep book, but it is not trying to be.

   It has attractive clear illustrations of one animal per page, a simple repeating structure with only a few new words each page, nice rhyme/meter. Its structure involves repeatedly anticipating the next animal, which makes it easy to memorize.

   It is a book my kids enjoyed “reading” aloud to themselves at age 1.5–2 before they could fully remember the content of more complicated picture books.

   * * *

   Of course, this isn’t the only type of book small kids should be listening to, and in the genre of extremely simple picture books there is a lot of abject garbage.

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2. bob_robertsMay 2021
   My kid went thought a phase of really liking "Brown Bear, Brown Bear." Probably about the same age. And I think you're right -- it's the anticipation of seeing what the next animal / color combination will be.

   Another one in a similar vein, which my kid liked, was "Here Are My Hands"

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3. quadrangleMay 2021
   I don't like this idea of grouping them all as similar. There's a huge range of toddler-focused books, some are great, some are awful, most are in-between.

   Brown Bear, Brown Bear from Carle himself is mediocre junk. It's just colors and animals, and has no character, no narrative, no arc.

   The Hungry, Hungry Caterpillar is an amazing, astounding masterpiece. It is usually printed with a sort of dynamic tactical approach with different page sizes, holes in the pages, the story has a real arc, it teaches biology, it carefully works in numbers and days of the week and the idea of time frame… it's a true stand-out.

   Most of Carle's stuff is somewhere in the middle, though he has a few other superb ones.

   Just like art for older audiences, there really is a range. You could say that all movies are the same: people having conflicts and doing stuff. On some level, they're all dramatic and simplistic.

   It's not mere taste. What makes a great book or movie for any age is not total relativism.

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4. gregorymichaelJun 2016
   Rosie Revere Engineer. https://www.amazon.com/Rosie-Revere-Engineer-Andrea-Beaty/dp...

   Also, I wrote a 900 word review of Brown Bear, Brown Bear analyzing it's subverisve warning about today's surveillance state. Pretty proud of that one.

   https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/cr/0805092447

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