This English vocabulary learning book from the early 1990s (could be older though) featured the daily life of a family in beautiful large center pictures of various scenes, with the outer rims of the pages containing objects from that scene to be found and named.
My most poignant memories are of a night time scene of the children casting shadows with their hands onto the bedroom wall, and a scene with a cross section of a fantastically large tree house with multiple connected rooms.
Any help is appreciated!
This sounds very much like Usborne’s First 1000 Words, 1980, with illustrations by Stephen Cartwright. I can’t remember anything specifically about shadow puppets, but each double spread was an image of the family – the ones I can remember are shopping in the supermarket, in the garden, in the kitchen, in the garage or the workshop, possibly a swimming pool?, definitely a toyshop. There were pictures of things to spot all around each page, and a duck to find on each spread. We loved them as kids!
Oh interesting! This looks absolutely adorable. The book I am looking for is structured exactly the same as this one (from what I can tell on Google images), but the art style was different, more of a realistically drawn look.
I remember now the youngest child of the family was a toddler named Susy or Suzy who was learning to walk, a picture of her laughing and crying was used to depict vocabulary words.
I hope your response will help people who check this post out for a similar query as mine! My quest continues, but thank you for responding.
No worries, I hope you manage to find it!
Solved!
It was Longman Picture Wordbook by Brian Abbs, illustrated by Giles Waring, from 1986.