Books by Ellen Heck

A Is for Bee: An alphabet book in translation

by Ellen Heck

An entertainingly subversive take on the usual alphabet book, with eye-catching scratchboard print illustrations. This is an educational picture book, too, giving children a glimpse of the world’s linguistic diversity. Each page has a letter of the English alphabet and animal words in languages other than English. A is for bee because bee is ‘aṅū’ in Igbo, ‘arı’ in Turkish, ‘aamoo’ in Ojibwe and ‘abelha’ in Portuguese. Hopefully any future edition will also include the scripts for those words in the languages that don’t use the Latin alphabet, to enable children to see some of the different writing systems in use around the world.

Ages 3+ and fun for adults too

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