This classic story has been entertaining children for more than 60 years. The characters are creative (musical instruments with faces) and sure to rev your little one's imagination in high gear. This is a great way for your child see many different types of instruments and associate them with the word, including tuba, bassoon, violin, flute, cello, oboe, trumpet, French horn, trombone, xylophone, and drum. There are also real measures of music on many pages, so your child can see what music 'looks' like. The vibrant pictures are shaded with colored pencil and have simple backgrounds, often even fading to white to help the characters pop off the page - particularly Tubby's bright golden hue. This is best seen when Tubby is sitting in the woods alone and the background is all shades of gray to signify that it's late in the evening, while Tubby is still brilliantly golden. The words on each page are set up creatively, sometimes located above the pictures, sometime below, and sometimes the words appear to be falling, like when they say Tubby was playing "Oh...so...slow" and each word is located lower on the page than the one before it. Italics add emphasis to sound effect words like, "oopah, oompah" and "bug-Gup", and alliteration adds even more fun with characters like "Peepo the Piccolo" and phrases like "My turn! Tooted the trumpet."
The different characters' dialogue provides great opportunities for you to add fun to the story by providing unique voices for each character - especially the frog. After a few readings, perhaps your little one will want to take over someone's lines and read with you. The pages are also filled with humor you and your child can enjoy together, whether it's the conductor's ridiculously long and thin mustache that sticks straight out or the violins which are offended and quite haughty toward Tubby when he refers to them as fiddles. The messages and morals in the book are also excellent starting points for important conversations with your little one. You can emphasize what a great friend Peepo is to Tubby, how it was wrong of the other instruments to tease and laugh at Tubby, or how brave Tubby was to have faith in himself to try something new even though he didn't know how it would turn out. Tubby broke through a stereotype that tubas cannot carry the melody.
I read this book with my four-year-old niece, Emily. She said the instrument-characters looked like 'Disney cartoons', and the bassoon really intrigued her. She asked if she could play an instrument and I told her she has lots of options of what to play, she can even be in her school band. She got very excited at this prospect and asked if she should play the tuba, like Tubby. I couldn't help laughing at the thought of tiny little Emily playing a tuba that is much larger than her, but I said, "You can play whatever you'd like, so long as you practice every day." Since then, she had changed her mind a few times from the tuba to the guitar, piano, flute, and most recently, the drums. I really hope it changes again for the sake of her parent's sanity!
--Audra