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Title: Peas and Thank You! (Big Idea Books?? / VeggieTales??)
ISBN: 0310705401
Author:
Inc., Big Idea
Mike Nawrocki
Publicate Date: 2003-08-01
Publish: 2003-08-01
List Price: $4.99
Average Customer Rating: 4.0
Format: Board book
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Amazon Lowest New Price: $1.82
Amazon Lowest Used Price: $0.01
Amazon Merchant Price: $4.99
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| Customer Review: |
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1: Bad Wording
This books talks about the polite West Manor peas and the rude beans from the south. It just doesn't sit right with me. I wouldn't read it to my child. It could have been accidental but it seems like a classist and racist innuendo.
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2: Cute book, great message
The story is fun to read, the illustrations are cute and it's a great message to teach young kids to help each other and use their manors. We have bought a few for gifts too.
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3: I love it - animations are awesome
Its my favorite book. I also send it to rude adults as a gag gift :)
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4: She loves green peas!
My niece loves this book and her green peas. She will even sit and pretend to read to herself and look at the pictures.
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5: Peas and Thank You
ISBN 0310705401 - Big Idea gets some serious kudos from me. They've figured out, in their VeggieTales series, how to market Christian stories and values to two tough groups: children with the attention span of flies and non-Christians. As a non-Christian parent who watched my own kid, and others, just loving these guys, I'm happily amazed. The only specifically Christian reference is on the back cover, in the form of a line from the bible.
Two nearby towns, West Manor and South Boorish, are inhabited by folks of very different habits. In West Manor, there are the Peas: happy, friendly and quick with the "please" and "thank you". Over in South Boorish, the Beans are grumpy, unsmiling, and unfamiliar with the terms of gratitude. While the grateful ones reap the benefits of their behavior, so do the ingrates. At sunflower seed picking time, the Peas work together to get buckets-full and the Beans merely snatch each other's seeds and wind up with few.
Is there a potential for some people to interpret an element of racism here? Yes, there is, especially those people who look for racism everywhere - there are two groups of "people", each group made of people who look and act alike but unlike the members of the other group. One group is better off. Were that the story, racism would seem a reasonable charge - but it's not the story. One group is better off than the other because of the way they behave, not the way they look or where they live. More to the point, this is a children's book, for ages 6 and under. If they're going to take away "Peas are better than Beans", it's going to show up at the dinner table, not in racist tendencies.
VeggieTales are great tools for teaching. Kids like the bright, funny vegetables, a change from the constant stream of cartoon animals. The images are very attractive, the text is to the point and still amusing and the message is clear: Good manners will get you further in life than being a meanie.
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