ALA Booklist (Sun Jul 01 00:00:00 CDT 2018)

Might may be right, but playing together nicely trumps everything. Young dinosaurs alternate turns on a seesaw, with progressively larger beasts appropriating each end, one after the other. When young Tyrannosaurus is outsized by Brachiosaurus, he vents his frustration and growls menacingly at his playmate. Suddenly, a mighty roar interrupts the tense standoff, and Mother Tyrannosaurus intervenes to restore harmony, making sure all the dinosaur tots play together happily. A line graph provides the relative size of each creature, ranging from the smallish Dimetrodon through the looming Brachiosaurus, and the final page shows how seesaws are simple machines, introducing concepts such as levers, fulcrums, and inclined planes. The whimsical pictures were created on hanji, traditional Korean paper made from mulberry trees, using Korean paints and watercolors. Despite their softly rounded, pudgy cartoon rendering, each dinosaur species is readily identifiable, which will appeal to preschool paleontologists. This simple lesson about sharing uses minimal text, but the message comes through loud and clear.

Horn Book (Mon Apr 01 00:00:00 CDT 2019)

After school, Chicken tells Papa: "Today my teacher told us every story has an elephant of surprise." Papa corrects Chicken ("an element of surprise"), but Chicken ignores him. The storybooks they read together are repeatedly hijacked by bold, lush illustrations reflecting Chicken's imaginative and elephant-filled retellings. Stein's mixed-media illustrations allow the narrative styles to bounce back and forth between silly and serious, honoring the warm, loving father-child relationship.

Kirkus Reviews

Dinosaurs on the playground (and readers who might wish to join them) get schooled both in physics and in the pleasures of noncompetitive play. Taking alternate ends of a log balanced on a round rock, a succession of ever larger dinos asserts supremacy over the playmate on the opposite end, smugly crowing "I'm bigger than you." But the tantrum a bright red T. Rex throws after being outweighed by a brachiosaur brings a change of perspective in the form of a much-larger T. Rex: "And I'm your mother!" With parental help, the log is pushed so that only one end is elevated, thus converting it to a slide that puts all of the dinosaurs on the same footing. Using brushwork that evokes traditional East Asian ink drawings (according to the production note she uses Korean paper and paints), Kyung creates minimally detailed prehistoric scenes featuring a cast of slightly anthropomorphic but recognizable dinosaurs. They are all identified, along with size gradations ranging from "Big" through "Massive" and "Immense" to "Biggest," in a closing gallery, which is followed by diagrams that explain, with a dollop of wry humor, the differences between a seesaw ("lever") and a slide ("inclined plane").A whimsical lesson in Mesozoic good manners, with an added treat for young STEM-winders. (Picture book. 5-7)

Publishers Weekly (Fri Oct 06 00:00:00 CDT 2023)

Dinosaurs with skins of subtly graded hues inhabit a misty Mesozoic forest, giving the spreads of this story a mysterious, otherworldly atmosphere. By contrast, its demonstration of comparative weight and balance couldn-t be clearer. -Who wants to play with me?- asks a lilac-colored dimetrodon, who teeters on one end of a big log balanced on a rock. An orange dinosaur (a minmi, the dinosaur guide at the back of the book explains) mounts the other end, driving the dimetrodon up into the air. -I-m bigger than you,- the minmi says. Drama builds as larger and larger dinosaurs step onto alternate ends of the log, and to underscore the action, the type grows larger, too. Working in hanji (traditional Korean paper) and paint accented with watercolor, Kyung creates scenes in green and silvery gray-that is, until a fire-engine-red Tyrannosaurus rex shows up, and the emotional temperature rises (and the log takes some punishment). Dinosaurs, physical action, playful repetition, and things that grow bigger and bigger will grab the attention of even the wiggliest listeners. Ages 4-8. (July)