Boost your child’s growing vocabulary with 75 hilariously illustrated poems from Colette Hiller, author of the critically acclaimed kids’ poetry book The B on Your Thumb.

*2024 Good Housekeeping Best Book of the Year*
*2025 CBC Librarian Favorites Winner*
*WINNER of the CLiPPA Poetry Prize 2025*


Each poem in this funny, funky book teaches a specific important word, as well as its meaning and spelling, in an innovative and accessible format that kids will love. Using rhythm and wordplay, the poems help build a colossal vocabulary, thinking skills and literacy – without kids even noticing! But most of all, this book delights young readers with the joy and silliness of the English language.
 
Building a colossal vocabulary has never felt so natural, or so much fun! Each word in this collection is defined in a simple rhyme. Using rhythm, humor and logic, each word’s meaning is made clear and accessible. Kids will want to try them out straight away: it’s a ready-to-use collection! You and your kids will love:

• Rolling rhymes that will be chanted again and again
• Fun and quirky drawings that bring these educational poems to life
• Holistic learning premise from Colette Hiller, skilled in writing educational poetry for children

From Ambiguous to Zealous, the words in this book are for 7-to-12-year-olds. It may seem inconceivable for one book to encompass such a wide age span! But in fact, inconceivable – and all the other words in this book – were selected from vocabulary lists intended for older children, so that younger children can challenge themselves and discover a wealth of great new words!

Colette Hiller is a writer, arts producer, and mother of twins. Her arts projects have reached hundreds of thousands of participants—she is the woman who put pianos and ping-pong tables in countless locations across the UK, and is also the mind behind the hit Talking Statues project.

Her children’s rhymes have been featured on BBC Words and Pictures and her children’s LP, Applehead, has been a hit with kids across the world, selling over 50,000 copies. An advocate of early learning, Colette believes that even very young children are receptive to the joy of wordplay (she taught her own twins to read by the time they were three).

Tor Freeman is a London-based illustrator. In 2012 she was awarded the Sendak Fellowship. In 2017 she won the Guardian Graphic Short Story Prize. Her books include the Digby Dog and Olive series.