If you know me, you know I LOVE stripes. With a closet filled with every iteration of striped blouse, you can imagine how drawn I was to Susan Stockdale’s book, Stripes of Types. This beautifully illustrated book depicts striped patterns on familiar and lesser known animals, insects, and reptiles, and describes their actions using vivid, interesting verbs (e.g. sprawled, sprinting, toting).
Lexical diversity, or exposure to unique words we don’t often use when we are casually talking to one another, is one of the many reasons our children benefit from being read to. Picture books like Stockdale’s, with detailed images paired with new vocabulary, is one way children learn new words outside of their day-to-day experiences.
While reading this book to your child, talk about where the animals have stripes. If you have younger children, this offers a new opportunity to work on novel word combinations. You can also get silly by acting out some of the verbs such as prowl and perch.
After reading this book, I delighted in having us dress in stripes and lookout for other patterns such as zig-zags and polka dots.