A colorful read that younger students love. A little girl keeps hearing that she should never let a unicorn scribble. She thinks that scribbling can be beautiful! She tries to teach her unicorn to draw nicely but... she ate the crayon! The little girl tries again and eventually the unicorn explodes with color. It is a scribble masterpiece. The girl is nervous to tell her mom, but her mom thinks its her best work yet. The end result is truly magical! The use of white in the illustrations really make this book stand out. A great read aloud about how it's okay to scribble and be colorful and be outside the lines. ( )

Audiobook
2019

In this book, we meet a young girl who has a unicorn. Everyone tells her she should NOT let her unicorn scribble. She doesn't understand this though, because unicorns ride rainbows and are magic! They should be able to scribble if they so choose. She decides to let her unicorn scribble with a pink crayon - but the unicorn eats it! It's the girl's favorite color! She's beginning to see why you should never let a unicorn scribble.

She then decides that maybe the unicorn just doesn't know how to use crayons and proceeds to show the unicorn how to color. She gives the unicorn another crayon and this time the unicorn eats HALF of the crayon! But! Maybe she is eating them because she can't hold them. Perhaps the girl will come up with an idea that might combat that issue. Her idea does work, to an extent. But now her whole room is redecorated with scribbles, paint, and glitter.

She's concerned about what her mother will think of the mess that was made in her room. But when her mother sees what is actually in her room, she says it's stunning. What do you think is actually in her room? Is it really redecorated by unicorn magic? Or is it something else all together?

I really liked the meaning behind the audiobook. At the end she says that while some people think that a unicorn shouldn't scribble, once it did, it ended up making a masterpiece. If it has never even attempted scribbling, it would've never known what talent it had. Also, it needed to take some time to practice, they didn't get it right the first two times - as a matter of fact, they crayons were eaten the first two times! But eventually, with a little practice and perseverance, the unicorn ended up doing something it would've otherwise never realized it could do. It just had to start.

This sentiment is true for all people. Others might tell you it can't be done, but you will never know unless you first try, try again, and practice.

The narrator of this story was British - I always like a good accent when I'm listening to a book. There was also some jaunty music playing in the background, which gave it a nice, fun, entertaining feeling.

I think that when a picture book is an audio book, it might be nice to have the book there with you to see the pictures. I did also find a narration of the book on YouTube. In the video, they showed all the pages of the book - and I really thought that was a good way to interact with a book while also listening to it.

The app I chose is super cute. It's called Endless Reader. It was the 2013 winner of Apple's Best of the Best Apps in 2013. It was the app of the week on geekwire.com. It is available via Android, Apple and through Amazon as a Kindle app as well. It's fully of colorful, fun, wacky monsters. Which I think is a very engaging way to encourage children to read and further their learning. I downloaded the app to see exactly how it worked. The user is presented with a word - in my case, the word was all. The word is spoken, then the cray monsters come out and knock the letters all over the place so that you only have the outline of the word left. The user is then supposed to put the letters where they belong. When you grab the 'A' it makes the ahhh sound, when you grab the 'L''s a purple mouth appears on the 'L' and sings la la la la. Then the monsters run out again and the user is presented with a full sentence - with some of the words missing (or in a faint outline). In this case the sentence stated: Pinkerton gobbled ___ ____ of ___ cookies! Off to the side there are the words all, up, and the randomly place throughout the screen. The user is then supposed to match the words to where the belong. When you grab up the volume slowly increases saying up, up, up, up making the word sound as though it is going up. If you move the word around the screen, it will continue saying the word. So, you just learned the word all - you use it in a sentence. Then a little monster comes and gobbles up all of the cookies. Once the cookies are all gobbled up - a voice comes on and reads the sentence aloud. So the child or user is learning a word, using it in a sentence, seeing an illustration of how the word is used, and then hears the sentence being spoken aloud.

The next word is ball - which adds on to the word you have already learned - all. When you have spelled ball - the word shifts into the shape of a ball. The process is repeated - with the sentence building. The next sentence introduces a color - red - and the word red is written in red. The next sequence is of a bird balancing the red ball on her beak.

I can't wait to see what my nephew thinks of this app! I think it's fun and engaging. He likes to watch Youtube videos with songs and stories. So, I'm hoping that he'll like this app and be able to learn from it as well. ( )