Bitte Anstellen (Line Up, Please!)

Flipper fell in love at the first sight with this book of Tomoko Ohmura as she saw it in a local library and put it by herself into our ‘borrowing bag’. No wonder, her fave animals are on the cover. And I fell in love with this book too as I read it. A short, simple but full of surprise and very hilarious book. Love! Love! Love! I gave it a 5 stars in Goodreads. After some times always doing renewal for this book in the library, I then decided to order the book from Amazon but before I buy it, the Lesestart Project had this book for 3 years old children. Flipper is not 3 years old yet but the librarian was so nice and gave the book to her anyway. Yay!

The story began as a frog saw a sign ‘Bitte anstellen’ and he was curious to see what was all about. A bird, as a kind of tour guide, welcomed him. In the next pages, there were  more animals already in queue line, from the little one -in this case frog with number 50- until the biggest one -elephant- number 1.

Yes it seems like only some animals standing in a line, queuing but it’s not boring. They have queue problems like impatient, hungry, smelly body, aggressive and even some unsympathetic animal were all there… Just like us, human being in a looong line for, an example,  merry go round or roller coaster in an amusement park…it could be a pain in the *ss. It’s amusing that a weasel even didn’t know what was he queuing for. Yes, what was the animals queuing for anyway??

The zebra was shaking, standing between the lion and the tiger. Both were hungry and the bird tried to calm down the lion with some sea grass 😀

It’s a roller coaster on a giant whale! All the 50 animals go on board the whale and the  whale brought them to slalom, spin, dive, dip and to splash! All the animals had sooo much fun. When the ride ended, the animals couldn’t wait to line up again even agree that the long queue was really worth it.

I use this book to train Flipper how to be patience in a waiting line. We had bad experiences in waiting such as in check in desk and security portal in airport or even in supermarket during waiting in check out desk. Well, she’s now still impatient and dislike waiting (oh who likes it anyway?! :D) but this book definitely brings some progress. Flipper now able to wait for her turn to play something (after some other kids) or waiting until I finished preparing her meal BUT waiting in supermarket, well…we have to learn it harder!

Beside that, with this book we can make some games for example I’ll ask Flipper which animals she already knows? How’s the sounds of the animals? What happened with the sheep? Why he didn’t want to move further? (because he’s afraid of wolf who tried to intimidating him), etc. Very recommended book, indeed.

German: Bitte Anstellen
English: Line Up, Please!
By Tomoko Ohmura,
44 pages.
Price in Amazon.de is €12,00 (German language)