The Collection ♡
Style
There’s a couple of reasons why I keep my illustrations bold and simple. I’m not a photo-realistic style artist and my life-like portraits are questionable at best, but there’s also a little science behind the collections I’ve created for Monkey & Me.
Simple outlines and bright colours catch young children’s eyes because they help kids to distinguish objects from one another in their field of vision.
Infants spend more time looking at bright colours as opposed to looking at muted shades or pastels. Plus, adding in the sounds and names not only make them educational, but fun, interactive nursery decor for you and your little ones to enjoy together!
Why Animal Sounds?
If you’ve ever watched a baby’s reaction to animal sounds, you’ll know that they often react with a smile or a giggle! The reason that babies and children love animal sounds so much is simple – because they love animals.
"Moo," “Roar,” “Baa,” are some of the very first sounds that we teach our children.
There’s a few different reasons that animal noises are so important for speech development, the main reason being that they are super easy for children to learn. And once babies or toddlers can learn to make animal sounds, they can then use them as a building block for creating other words.
Not only do animal sounds help little ones learn new words, they also pave the way for learning sentences like ‘Cow Moo’ or ‘Sheep Baa’. Since toddlers are absolutely fascinated with animals, words like these will capture their attention more than that of an inanimate object like ‘a table’.
Of course the best way to help a child associate animals with noises is with real world interaction. Telling a little one that a dog says ‘woof’ doesn’t really mean a great deal if they don’t actually know what a dog is!
My collection of animal sound prints have been designed with exactly this in mind, bold, simple illustrations of various animals with the sound that they make.
Try pointing at the animals, say what they are, have fun making the sounds with your little ones and then help them make associations in the real world – when you’re at the local farm or Zoo, find cows that ‘moo’ or lions that ‘roar’!
Reference: Robert McKenzie, Speech Blubs