Pig the Winner product reviews

Since receiving this book both of my girls have tried to claim it as their own and put it into their own stock pile of books. You know your onto a winner when this happens. My seven year old can read it by herself and having only received last week they have both read it over a dozen times - even my four year old tries to read it as well - well more recalls from memory.

I love books that rhyme and have a point to them. The moral of this story is fantastic especially since we know a little girl who is just like Pig. My youngest does ballet and one of her little friends cries non stop if she does not win dancer of the day and makes a huge scene fortunately the ballet teacher does not give in to her and instead we all try to ignore her as best we can.

I love how the pages are not boring white but instead has the occasional yellow or blue just to brighten it up and the font is nice and bold and large in places. The pictures are cute and as a whole it is a lovely book. Both of my girls have inherited the competition gene from me and they enter plenty of competitions and when they do not win something they had their heart set on this book will surely help - although in all honesty they are pretty good about losing the occasional time. Truely a book that will be treasured in times to come.

We were lucky enough to get to review Pig the Winner by Aaron Blabey and we got to review one of his other books Pig the Pug which we thoroughly enjoyed. When the book arrived and I had taken it out of the package Miss three immediately said "Look it's Pig the Pug I have that book" and ran to her bedroom to collect her Pig the Pug book. When she brought it back she pointed out pig and said "see told you it's the same" with a big grin on her face because she recognised they were the same.

I was blown away with the bright coloured pictures throughout the book and how simplistic the pictures were. Nice and clean cut but so bold that they stood out and were very clear. The pages only had a few pictures on each with a clean cut background which made the characters stand out. I really like the simplicity of this, as cluttered pages draw away from the story in my opinion.

I love the story line of this book, it has great morals. It teaches children that it is OK to win or loose but it's not OK to cheat your way into winning which in my opinion is something children need to be taught. There's winning and then there is cheating like Pig the Pug. I won't go into the story line in too much detail as I don't want to ruin it for potential future readers, but I really like the story line and the morals it portrays. It is something that children deal with a lot so they can relate to it, which I find is great as if a child can relate to it, they will become more interested in the story.

We already own Pig the Fibber and it is a great hit with all the children in my home as are a couple of other Aaron Blabey books so I knew Pig the Winner would be popular with them too. As soon as they saw this book one of them grabbed Pig the Fibber off the shelf to check if it was the same dog. This resulted in me having to one book after the other, which I didn't mind as I love them as much as the kids.

Before reading it with the 3 children (all 4.5 years old) that provide homebased childcare for, we had a look at the front cover. They already knew Pig was a pug dog but they didn't know about why he had the number one on him. They realised that this was actually a gold medal for coming first and his hands were raised in celebration of his victory.

The favourite part for the children was when Pug gobbled his food so fast that he ate the bowl too. This resulted in his friend Trevor giving him the Heimlich maneuver and Pug face down in the rubbish bin. The kids laughed loudly each time. I found the ending went over their heads as it was about cheating in a game of cards but they didn't know that there should only be one of each card in a pack.

As a parent and educator the thing I loved best about this book was it was a fun way to teach children about fair play and winning or loosing graciously. One of the children mentioned above will have a meltdown if someone else gets to close the door or empty the letterbox so I encouraged her (I wasn't hard with such fun book) for her to listen to the story each time I read it. We have also been doing a lot of discussion when reading this and it is usually started by the kids.

Last week one of the children had his preschool graduation and he was asked to take along his favourite book to share with everyone. He chose this one. All the children loved the book and the adults did too with several of them commenting on the good message in it. We are eager to see if there will be more books in the series as we will have to read them, and probably buy them too.