Review: THE NEIGHBORHOOD MOTHER GOOSE, Module 4, Poetry

Crews, Nina. 2004. THE NEIGHBORHOOD MOTHER GOOSE. Greenwillow Books. ISBN # 0060515732

This modern book of poetry is a collection of favorite, familiar and not so familiar rhymes. This collection is unique in that the illustrations are true photographs which portray real children in a city setting. The photographs have been manipulated with cutting, pasting, shrinking and enlarging to elaborate on the whimsical rhymes. In THERE WAS A LITTLE GIRL, the girl with the curl has a sweet face with a small cute curl in the middle of her forehead. Her expression does seem to show that she can be very good, but her actions are proving that “when she was bad, she was horrid”. She is cutting all the hair off of a Barbie doll! In RIDE A COCKHORSE there is a very fine lady upon a white horse, a white carrousel horse. She is very brilliant in colorful authentic African clothing and layers of jewelry. She does seem to shine and bring “music wherever she goes”. In HEY DIDDLE DIDDLE, all the characters are present. A real cat is holding a real fiddle; there is a larger than life dish and spoon frolicking behind a wooden fence and in the background a cow is leaping over a beautiful full moon. In rhyme after rhyme children are portrayed with common objects which bring additional meaning to the rhymes. Children will recognize familiar objects and see children just like themselves. They will connect with these rhymes like never before.