Snow is a great book for the winter season or getting ready for a snow day. This mostly picture book is great for children of younger grades who are has or has not seen snow. The author Roy McKie uses a lot of snow ideas that children can relate to or even want to try. An easy read and also a lot illustrations makes up this book called Snow.

READING IS FUNDAMENTAL: Pre-K - 2nd (3-7).

I notice that some people deeply analyse the functionality of the book in how well it would work to help children to read and to understand the English language, and there are others that simply go on about how much they loved this book when they were a kid (and have probably not read it since then). Then there is me, who will read the book and then make comments about it in the same way that I made comments about Mister Dog: The Dog Who Belonged to Himself and The Three Bears. Mind you, I'm not going to be making any outrageous comments about this book other than the fact that while I think that it is stupid I still feel the urge to give it a high rating.

This is what you would call a nonsense book – not in the sense of Alice in Wonderland nonsense but nonsense in the sense that this book is stupid. Basically it has a kid running around his house pointing out all of the weird and wonderful creatures that happen to rhyme with the item of furniture that then live on or in. The pictures are also quite silly as well, but as I said something is forcing me to give this book a high rating and I really do not know why.

Hey, I liked this book as a kid, and I notice that I tend to prefer the Dr Seuss books to the Little Golden Books (and I have said more than enough on that already). The rhyme and meter are exceptional, though it is not hard to create a rhyme when you are basically making up all of the words that you are rhyming. Oh, who am I to complain – Dr Seuss is a very famous and much loved children's author and as such it doesn't matter how stupid his books are, he still made money off of them.

I remember this book with all of the fun and the wonder of a punch in the face (no, not really, but I felt like saying that at the opening to this commentary). Once again we have Papa Bear attempting to show off to his kid how wonderful he is and then pretty much making a complete mess of the situation which results in his kid, once again, bailing him out, but also under the strange belief that he has actually learnt something.

This book was obviously written in the northern hemisphere, or at least in the regions where it actually snows for Christmas (because down here – or should I say up here – in the Antipodes we never see snow at Christmas, so we are forever dreaming of a white Christmas – actually, come to think of it, I don't think I have ever dreamt of a white Christmas because to me Christmas is about hot days and swims at the beach and barbecues in the back yard, as well as going to church and midnight mass).

In a way the book's only connection with Christmas is the gifts that little bear gets and it then goes into the familiar parts of where Papa Bear tries to teach little baby bear something and fails abysmally. The fact that some people hate this aspect of the book (and one person has thrown his Berenstain Bears books out in disgust, though I wonder if the accident prone buffoon of a father is a little too close to home for him) makes me feel comfortable when people criticise my commentary of Mister Dog.

Well, here is a children's book that encourages you to break into somebody's house and then run amok smashing everything! Why do I say that? Because that is what the two protagonists, a bird and a mouse, are doing. Firstly the mouse opens the window and invites the bird in. Then they run around pointing out all of the items that one can find in a house until such a time as they knock over a bunch of valuable items creating a massive mess. However they are caught and thrown out (which is probably the better way of looking at it because I suspect that real people would not be as kind to a couple of animals running amok in their house).

As for a book (and ignoring my perspective that it encourages breaking into people's houses, and I can just see the judge shaking his head in disbelief when somebody claims that the reason that he broke into his neighbours house was because he had been influenced, as a kid, by Dr Suess' 'In a People House') the rhyme that he uses is really good, and it is much better than that Little Golden Book I read that was about Dinosaurs where the writer tries to use a rhyming pattern, as well as meter, and then tosses it away in frustration, only to try it again on the next page. Dr Suess (aka Theo LeSieg) seems to have a very good ability to use rhyme and meter which he does excellently in this book.

However, if you try to translate it into German it completely falls apart (and I am not going to attempt to even consider translating it into Ancient Greek, though I believe that it is possible). Also, Dr Suess (aka Theo LeSieg) uses alliteration very effectively. Once again if I were to attempt to translate it into German (or Ancient Greek) then the alliteration would be completely destroyed. I know because I attempted to do that as I was reading the book and I noticed that the beautiful rhyme, meter, and alliteration were completely destroyed.

This story, structured in beautiful meter and excellent rhyme, is about how we set ourselves huge goals, and imagine huge success, only to put it off because we prefer to sit under a tree and pass our days catching the rays from the sun. The protagonist in this book (known only as 'I') is a man who has great hopes for his dog because he wants to teach his dog 100 words, but not only teach him those words but to also teach him how to do these things.

It seems that the first thing he wants to teach the dog is to do what we call 'busy work' which is work that has no appreciable outcome other than to keep people busy – such as digging a hole and then filling it in again. However he also wants to teach his dog very complex things, such as painting a road, cleaning a zoo, and giving a moose a clean with a mop. It seems that the protagonist believes that his dog is a very intelligent dog (but since he never actually does it we don't know how intelligent this dog really is: we can only speculate).

If he does succeed (and there is no evidence that he will, because he is only speculating) then he imagines that he will become the talk of the town because he has such an amazing dog that can spray paint chairs, perform marvellous feats of acrobatics, and clean a moose with a mop. As such he imagines fame, glory, and a public holiday dedicated to his dog.

However, despite all of these grand plans, in the end it seems that it is simply too hard, and the sun too nice, that it is better to go outside, lie down under a tree, and go to sleep.