Book Description
for Diez Deditos by José-Luis Orozco and Elisa Kleven
From Cooperative Children's Book Center (CCBC)
Thirty-four traditional and original action songs are abundantly illustrated with Kleven's trademark collage assemblages filled with happy children, interacting families, and people with individual faces and skin colors. The finger games are graphically represented with brief written directions and clear diagrams. Music notations suggest the tunes and can be played on a guitar or recorder by older children and adults quite new to these instruments. A bilingual subject index cites ten entries under Animals, Body Parts (8), Call-and-Response (2), Clapping (7), Counting (4), Dances (5), Family (3), Farewell (2), Finger Play (8), Food (4), Friendship (3), Greetings (3), Group Play (5), Musical Instruments (2), Professions (1), Self-Esteem (5), Sorrow (1), Special Celebrations (3), Tickling (2), Time (1), Transportation (1), Vowel Sounds (1), and Weather (2). Everything about this cheerful book is child friendly. Its Spanish-language friendly, too, with Spanish words under the music and nearest to the graphic finger games; the English translations are secondary. Orozco brings a wealth of first-hand life experience to the book's entries; he and Kleven were matched in the fine earlier volume De Colores and Other Latin-American Folk Songs for Children (Dutton, 1994) aimed at a slightly older child audience than this. (Babies - age 8, adults)
CCBC Choices 1997. © Cooperative Children's Book Center, Univ. of Wisconsin - Madison, 1997. Used with permission.