A Perfect Day Hardcover – Picture Book, November 13, 2012

On a snowy day children enjoy a day of sledding, snowball fights, making designs in the snow with their footprints, snow angles, and building snowmen until it was time to go home.Berger’s craft of words and skill with paper collages opens up the village world right from the very first page and takes the reader on a fun filled childhood day of wintertime fun. It is a quick and easy read with few new words to practice. However the unusual children’s names keep my beginning reader interested and gave a sense of mastery. Each collage has a story within itself and sparked ideas for more stories by the reader. My reader wanted to know why there was cursive writing on the pages. When I told him the artist had used recycled paper to make the beautiful pictures, he was amazed that you could make art out of trash. We discussed different colors and types of paper that one could collect for art projects.The part of the story my reader like the very best was the children sledding on different types of sleds. Before we could put the book on the shelf we had to match the children’s names to the snow angels. That is when we discovered there were more names than angels. Can you discover how many? It sparked math questions and took us on more reading fun. The part my reader did not like is not having a snow angel for each child’s name. I came up with the idea that the reason was because the child went home early and didn't make an angel. My reader was happy with my answer.A PERFECT DAY is a great resource for the home or school library of children between the ages of two through eight. Some ideas to further extend a young readers learning in Art, Language Arts, Social Studies and Math are to make pictures from old scrapes of paper, draw about their own wintertime fun, discuss if it doesn't snow where you live, what type of winter time fun do you have or go ice skating indoors. Math skills can be enhanced by asking the child how many new things they find on each page and comparing numbers from one page to the next. Are they the same or different?

The pages are difficult to turn because the images are both serene and full of a child's joy of snow. And then you would like to race ahead to see the next page as you are inspired by the visual feast. The quality of the illustrations are stunning. Some of the images have an oriental woodblock feel. One in particular, the snow hill looks as if it is a Tsunami wave. Another illustration, has a child with a beautiful umbrella and snowballs of different proportions that look magical.The book is illustrated over an old accounting ledger that brings a subtle shadow below the snow. The illustrations seem to be a continuous painting that was then cut down to pages which gives it a cinematic quality of a constant pan shot.It is a joy to view.

I look for books with an interesting story/perspective and pretty/interesting artwork. This book is good. We liked both.With little kids, you have to read and re-read books, so I try to find ones we will all enjoy over and over.

Saw how to use this book for an Art and Literature project on Deep Space Sparkle web site. The story is of a perfect day of snowy fun for children. A coordinating art project would be to paint children making snow angels. Can't wait to try it when we get back in school after being out for snow. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED by this art teacher.

Good book for winter pre-K unit

This is a lovely book which quietly captivates the imagination of a winter day. I especially liked the illustrations! I used this as a springboard for an mixced media art project with primary grade children. Loved it!

A charming, delicate, happy book. The illustrations are detailed and precious. They are so lovely that I really wish the book was bigger in size. This copy is for me, but I will buy this as a gift for some young families and pair it with some hot cocoa mix.

This is a fun winter read when reading to younger kids.