SPRING THINGS

Winter’s thaw brings numerous activities, in pictures and verse. Raczka’s catchy rhyming text is told mostly in gerunds (“sunning, warming, thunderstorming”), and Stead offers simple pleasant acrylic paintings for each. In the beginning, a snowman is melting as two children catch the drips from an icy tree in their mittens. There’s also baseball, a lemonade stand, working in a garden, etc. At times, Raczka works some fun linguistic twists—“trees leaf-outing”—to keep his rhyme going. And maintaining the “ing” allows him to build to the appropriate finale, “spring,” with an accompanying two-page illustration of a verdant field studded with frolicking children and bright flowers, birds, butterflies and bees. The minimum of words should make this more inviting to its very young target audience, while the pictures might stimulate creative play. (Picture book. 2-5)