Extending her line of illustrated nursery rhymes, award-winner Heather Collins delivers Out Came the Sun, an anthology of children’s verse both familiar and obscure brought to life by softly hued watercolour depictions of a family of stuffed animal characters.

Collins seems to have based her selections based more on the tone and rhythm of the verses than on the actual words and their meanings, so that young listeners will be soothed and captivated by the sounds of the language. The nursery rhymes are arranged to tell the story of a single day, from morning until bedtime, in the lives of the toy animal characters. A mother hen oversees a brood consisting of a bunny, a piglet, a dog, a baby elephant, and others. The book begins with Cock Robin’s morning song and ends – after a very full day of surreal antics propelled by the endemic inanities and strangenesses of traditional rhymes – with a farewell to the man in the moon. The animals begin and end the day inside a large country house, and range across fields and ponds and even into the air. Along the way, we get Pease Porridge Hot, Row Your Boat, Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, and the like. Though the verses flow together, they can be read selectively.

The rich and warm illustrations depart from traditional visual renderings of the classic verses and help smooth out the rough, perplexing edges or more antiquated turns of phrase that may confound younger children. (What little kid knows about swine, frocks, or pease porridge these days, or even why anyone would go “to market to find a fat hog”?)