A review of:


One Mole Digging A Hole

by Julia Donaldson, illustrations Nick Sharatt


‘One Mole Digging A Hole’ is wrongly advertised as ‘the perfect book to teach your toddler about numbers and rhyme!’

My toddler has proven again and again completely incapable of learning rhyme from this book. Let’s begin at the beginning. The title:

One Mole
Digging a Hole

For any uncertain readers, the rhyme is ‘Mole’ with ‘Hole’. But my toddler insists on reading it like this:

One Mole
Digging a Hole, up.

No matter how many hours I try to persuade him that ‘less is more’ and the word ‘up’ should be dropped, he goes on. So far, so bad. That’s just the title and first page.

As we move into the book, the other rhymes prove equally incomprehensible to the toddler mind. For example, on one page there is a picture of four foxes filling boxes. Those boxes cause him deep, deep uncertainty. He points, his lip quivers, he says: ‘that?’ I say ‘boxes’.

He says again: ‘that?’

‘Boxes.’

…

‘That?’

I ask him to repeat the rhyme after me. He tries, but nonetheless out comes:

Four foxes
Filling … [points at boxes] … that.

Now consider the following facts.

  1. Neither my wife nor I like apples. We do not have apples in the house. We do not talk about apples. Apples are not on our lips, verbally or literally.
  2. We like pears. Pears are our kind of fruit. On our kitchen table, there are the pears, ready for after dinner. We know what pears look like.
  3. When we do say the words pears, bears, and apples, we say them normally. We don’t say, for instances, applears, to make ‘apples’ rhyme with ‘bears’. Nor do we say for ‘bears’, ‘bearles’. We say ‘pears’, in the normal way, and ‘bears’ in the normal, rhyming way.
  4. We do not have a weird relationship with alliteration. We do not deliberately avoid, or court, alliteration. It simply crops up in our speech normally and naturally.
  5. We do not tell our toddler that bears eat apples.

So it is a mark of this book’s failure that the following rhyme:

Three bears
Picking pears

is repeated by my toddler like this:

Three bears
Picking apples.

This is not the perfect book to teach your toddler about rhyme.