Old MacDonald Had a Farm

Look through the peep-hole on each page of this colorful book and watch Old MacDonald as he goes about his chores. Can you guess what animal is to come? A delightful, engaging twist on a traditional song gives it new life for a new generation.

In this version of the familiar song, the reader is asked to guess which animal comes next by looking through a peep hole.

Look through the peep-hole on each page of this colorful book and watch Old MacDonald as he goes about his chores. Can you guess what animal is to come? A delightful, engaging twist on a traditional song gives it new life for a new generation.

School Library Journal

PreS-Gr 1 --Yet another example of the English school of illustration: solid craftsmanship, attention to all sorts of details, low-key humor. This text does not accumulate the farm animal sounds. Rather, each left-hand page is a fully developed scene of a kindly white-bearded farmer in some part of his modest farm with all the animals as they are mentioned. On the right are the three repeated lines about Old MacDonald having a. . . . In the middle of this page is a hole, two inches in diameter, exposing a part of the next animal in the picture on the following page. The picture, when fully exposed by turning the page, is equally detailed, and the hole frames the farmer's face from the previous picture--a consistently neat piece of design. Jones' approach is naturalistic with a soft overlay of humor: this is a happy farm. Her fine black inked lines structure a benign world that is as peaceable a kingdom as one could wish, an animated rather than static one. The transparent watercolors create a lush, late-summer bucolic comfortable rightness where all the animals, birds, frogs, insects, rodents, and man live in peace. If this is indeed nostalgia (no TV, electric wires, or even any machines), it is symbolic also of a better symbiotic relationship among nature's creatures than we now experience. --Kenneth Marantz, Art Education Department, Ohio State University, Columbus

Born and educated in England, Carol Jones now lives in Australia. She is a full-time author and illusrutor who has given new life to many old favorites.