Hatch and match by Ruth Paul

An array of different coloured chickens will enthuse younger readers as they look over each exciting, colourful page full of things to find. In so doing they will come across the words and image for a variety of things, like egg, zig zag, spots, stars and stripes, as they try to find the egg owned by the particular chook.

Rhyming lines will be easily read by the adult or older child as the audience will eagerly predict the rhyming words and get into the rhythm of the lines.  Of course stopping at each page is a given as pairs of excited eyes and fingers devour each page to look for the eggs. 

The eggs are depicted on the first endpaper, and on the last are the chickens with their distinctive emblems. 

The book opens with a picture of the chickens all roosting in one tree. They are the same but different and the reader is asked to note the differences. Each morning the rooster crows and the chickens all come down from the tree to scratch and scratch. They then look for their eggs, the reader being asked to spot the eggs that have the same pattern  as one of the chickens. They can be found anywhere: under the tree, in a shoe or in the haystack. The whole purpose becomes clear when the eggs are sat upon, eventually hatching to become fluffy yellow chicks. Each has a distinctive emblem which the readers are asked to match the chicks with the hens. 

This colourful interactive story leads children to see the similarities and differences between the animals, leading to the last page, ‘just the same as you and me’.

Themes: Similarity, Difference, Farmyard, Chickens.

Fran Knight