Old Mikamba Had a Farm
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
This fabulous version of the classic nursery song “Old MacDonald” introduces children to a menagerie of African animals and their sounds. It is beautifully illustrated by Caldecott Honor winner Rachel Isadora, with her signature collage-style artwork.
Old Mikamba had a farm, E-I-E-I-O. And on this farm he had . . . a giraffe, a baboon, and an elephant! Meet Old Mikamba, who watches over a wide variety of animals on his game farm in the plains of Africa. Children will discover a whole new set of fun animal sounds as they are invited to sing along and roar with the lions, bellow with the rhino, whinny with the zebras, honk with the wildebeests, and more!
A wonderful introduction to African wildlife that is great fun to read aloud, this truly irresistible rendition of a beloved song includes a list of animal fun facts and gives children a huge variety of animal sounds to imitate as they pore over the detailed animals, landscapes and patterns in the stunning illustrations.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
As she did in There Was a Tree, Isadora sets this riff on a classic children's song in Africa. Using "Old MacDonald" as a template, her rendition introduces 14 wild residents of a game farm and the sounds they make. With a few exceptions (dassie, springbok), the species will be familiar to most readers, and their phonetically punchy utterings, which include a baboon's "OOH-HA-HA" and a wildebeest's "HONK-HONK," are fun to imitate while singing along. Though Isadora's earth-toned, mixed-media illustrations are uncluttered the animals appear against mostly white backdrops with minimal landscape there is complexity within. The collages feature an inventive assortment of textures and patterns: elephants' and rhinos' hides are newsprint, wildebeests' fur resembles wood grain, and giraffes' spots are swatches of patterned textiles; borders feature the scrubby vegetation and low hills of the book's plains setting. Intriguing incidental facts about each animal (no two zebras have the same stripe pattern; there are more than 370 species of parrots) are included at the end of the book, which strikes a neat balance between being rousing and soothing. Ages 3 5.
