All Along the River || Why We Love Seek & Find Books

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Ready to engage your preschooler with beautiful literature but don’t know where to start? Here’s our favorite book right now.

All Along the River, a beautifully written and illustrated picture book by Magnus Weightman introduces your young child to stunningly detailed pictures and a short story that will pull on heart-strings and lay the first building blocks of critical thinking and visual discernment.

A special thanks to Timberdoodle Co. for providing us with a complimentary copy of All Along the River in exchange for our honest review. All opinions are our own!

All Along the River is included in the Preschool Curriculum Kit, and is also available individually.

I read this book to my 2-year-old and 8-year-old and they both enjoyed the story and the seek-and-find aspect.

Literature and reading aloud is so important in a child’s development, but it’s especially crucial in the first 5 years. Exposing children to new words, phrases, patterns, rhymes, and characters engage a child’s brain and set the building blocks for reading and writing skills down the road.

I love that Timberdoodle kits come with picture books like this one to get you started on literature and also provide the first step to critical thinking skills and discernment with the seek-and-find aspect.

In All Along the River, there are 12 full-color detailed scenes in the story, and Timberdoodle recommends that you focus on one scene per week to discuss and explore with your child in depth. You can also, of course, read the full story at once, but when you do that you won’t be deep-diving into all the details of each page as most young children won’t have the attention span for that.

While it’s geared toward children 3-6, the story and pictures are wonderful for all children. As I said, my kids are 2 and 8 and they both adored the book. I can see reading this book many times with my little one over the years.

Each page is so incredibly detailed that it’s easy to miss the way there are multiple parallel storylines going on at once. First, you have Bunny Rabbit who lost her favorite toy Little Duck, who has a red scarf around her neck. Her brothers come to the rescue to help her search for her lost duck who is floating down the river.

But as they sail by new towns and landscapes, there are a handful of other characters featured on each page who are having their own adventures. Laura Lamb has a new item on her fishing pole on each page. Mama and Papa Bunny appear in a different building or location. Chuck the Chicken finds items on the ground and returns them to their owners. The Road Hogs are racing somewhere…which is revealed at the end. And that’s only the beginning. A handful of other characters have challenges and stories on each spread.

You can easily spend 5-10 minutes on each spread asking questions, discussing what you see, and helping your child understand all the storylines that are being presented. Even as an adult, it’s interesting to look at each character and decipher what they are doing and the problems that are occurring or being solved. This isn’t just a mundane book you’ll get sick of reading over and over!

I’m genuinely impressed with the quality and depth of All Along the River and highly recommend it for every family with young kids!

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