Caillou The Phone Call Book

This fun and delightfully engaging picture book about musical instruments and the various sounds they make is truly a small but mighty gem. Featuring an engaging, poetic text (Lloyd Moss has really captured the essence of each of the presented instruments with his delightful, fun onomatopoeic verses) and combined with Marjorie Priceman's bright and lively, descriptive and to me dancing illustrations, I can certainly understand why and how Zin! Zin! Zin! A Violin was chosen as a Caldecott Honor book.

Zin! Zin! Zin! A Violin! thus presents an informative and entertaining, captivating way to introduce younger children not only to ten essential musical instruments, but it also, of course, works as a simple counting book, portraying the numbers one to ten (and solo to a chamber group of ten musicians). The only minor problem I, personally, have tended to encounter with Zin! Zin! Zin! A Violin! is the font size and the fact that the text is generally rather curved, which I find somewhat distracting whilst reading. I would actually be somewhat afraid of misreading or accidentally skipping parts of the narrative, if I were reading this otherwise excellent offering aloud to children.