Books like Alligators All Around
By Maurice Sendak
For the kid who's starting to notice letters everywhere, this turns the alphabet into a rowdy family romp instead of a lesson. Playful, wry, a little wild, dryly funny in that particular Sendak way.
An alphabet parade of animals acts out each letter with a matching verb — an aardvark admiring, beavers ballooning, cats cleaning — all the way to a zigzagging zebra.
Farmer Brown's cows find a typewriter in the barn and start leaving him notes with demands — and when he refuses, the whole farm goes on strike.
A rhyming romp through prehistoric history reveals underpants-loving dinosaurs, including a strutting T. rex, whose obsession sparked the legendary Underpants War that really wiped them out.
A parade of rhyming oddballs takes readers from near to far and here to there — a bumpy Wump, a singing Ying, a winking Yink who drinks pink ink — with no plot but plenty of silly counting and rhyming along the way.
A Siamese kitten with an overactive imagination transforms into El Skippito, a mask-and-cape sword-fighter, ready to take on banditos and a bad bumble-beeto to save the day.
A boy tours his own house room by room, discovering odd made-up creatures hiding in ordinary spots — a Wocket in his pocket, a Vug under his rug, a Yeps on the steps.
A hungry creature works its way through a snack-filled alphabet, eating everything in sight from A to P before regret sets in — and a resolution to change follows.
Five little monkeys jump on the bed after saying goodnight to Mama — and one by one, they fall off, bump their heads, and get a call to the doctor.
Three animals model colorful hats, shirts, and pants with calm confidence, while a fumbling turkey gets dressed all wrong, turning every page into a game of spotting the mistake.
All the letters of the alphabet race each other up a coconut tree, chanting chicka chicka boom boom, until so many pile on that the whole tree tumbles them down.
A man walks down the road and meets a donkey with only three legs, then keeps adding one silly detail after another until the description spirals into an entirely absurd creature.
A beloved family dog named Hally Tosis has breath so terrible her family wants to give her away, so the kids try every trick they can think of to fix her putrid panting before it's too late.
