Preschool Book Review - Snakes!
🎓 Skills Your Child Will Develop
- 📚 Pre-Reading Skills — Activities that involve letters, sounds, rhymes, and print directly build the phonological awareness and letter knowledge that are the two strongest predictors of successful reading development.
- 😊 Love of Learning — Positive early learning experiences build a child's identity as a learner — and children who see themselves as curious, capable learners approach school with the engagement and resilience that matter more than any specific skill.
- 🧠 Memory & Recall — Remembering rules, retelling a story in sequence, and practicing skills to automaticity builds working memory and long-term recall — the cognitive foundation that learning in every subject depends on.
- ⚡ Executive Function — Planning, sequencing steps, holding rules in mind while acting, and stopping a prepotent response all build executive function — the cluster of cognitive skills most strongly predictive of long-term academic and life success.
From The Preschool Book
"Tangled like spaghetti, slithery and sweaty, nesting in a heap beneath your bed. Can you feel your mattress shaking? Slowly they're awaking and it's months and months and months since they have fed."
About The Preschool Book
Snakes! is the story of a boy who is not afraid of anything, anything that is, except snakes. He imagines that there are snakes everywhere and being used for everything he can think of. Will this almost fearless boy learn to overcome his fear of snakes?
From The Reviewer
Snakes! is a galloping rhyme that uses alliteration and wonderful wordplays to pull preschoolers into the story. The colorful illustrations are full of action and will have preschoolers laughing and the funny things the boy thinks of for snakes to do.
The surprise ending helps the boy to overcome his fear of snakes and will teach preschoolers that things are not always the way they appear. For preschoolers who have a fear of snakes some of the early images may be frightening as the boy begins to dream about snakes but they become more comical as the book progresses.
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Helpful Tips for Parents
- Learning environments matter. A space with accessible books, puzzles, art supplies, and natural materials at child height encourages more learning than a child-proofed empty room.
- Screen learning (educational apps and videos) supplements but never replaces human interaction as a teaching medium. Learning happens most efficiently in social, conversational contexts.
- Curiosity is more valuable than knowledge. A curious child who doesn't know the answer will find it. A knowledgeable child who has lost curiosity will stop learning.
- Sleep is educational. Memory consolidation — the process of moving learning from short-term to long-term memory — happens during sleep. Well-rested children learn more effectively.
- Choose toys that grow with the child: open-ended materials (blocks, clay, art supplies) remain valuable for years; single-use toys with one correct answer produce brief engagement.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I know if my preschooler is learning enough at home?
Developmental milestones (not academic benchmarks) are the appropriate assessment tool for preschoolers. Verify your child is meeting age-appropriate milestones for language, motor, social-emotional, and cognitive development using your pediatrician's well-child visit assessments. Preschoolers learning through play, conversation, books, and daily life engagement are learning more than their standardized test scores will later reflect. Concern is warranted if a child shows regression in skills previously mastered, or fails to meet speech and language milestones.
What is the role of technology in preschool education?
High-quality educational apps and programs (PBS Kids, Khan Academy Kids, Starfall) used in limited, adult-co-viewed sessions can supplement preschool learning. However, interactive human experiences (conversation, shared book reading, hands-on experimentation, social play) remain far superior as primary learning modes. Screen-based learning is most effective when it is: co-viewed with an adult, limited to 30–60 minutes per day, followed by extension activities in the real world (after a nature app, go outside), and consistently educational rather than commercial.
Related reading: See also our writing readiness guide and our alphabet activities for more ideas on this topic.
Questions to Ask Your Child
Use these open-ended prompts to extend the learning during or after the activity:
- "What was the hardest part? What made it tricky?"
- "What would happen if we made the rules a little different?"
- "Can you teach me how to do your favorite part?"
- "What would you add to make this even more fun?"
- "What did you notice while we were doing this?"
- "How would this be different if we played it outside?"
There are no right or wrong answers to any of these questions. The goal is to keep the conversation going, model curious thinking, and give your child practice putting their experience into words.
