Pooh wakes up one spring morning hungry for honey. As he hunts down a beehive to raid, he keeps meeting his friends one by one, and they keep reminding him that he has forgotten they're all gathering today at noon. Pooh frets as he tries to remember what's up. It's the most overused Pooh plot structure, and sure enough it ends with a party.

The gimmick of the "Learning with Pooh and Friends" series is that little encyclopedia entries and photographs are inserted on the outer edges of the story pages. So when Pooh walks through grass, we're told what grass is and that wheat is also a grass and shown a picture of wheat grains on the end of a stalk. Since the story is so generic, most of the entries are about common stuff in the background of the illustrations, like the sun, flowers, trees, ducks, and bees. It's silly and distracting.

The pictures all seemed familiar, so I searched "Pooh picnics" in my book database, and sure enough, this is another instance of Disney recycling art from another project. While the text is new and the order has been shuffled, the illustrations were all originally published in 2000 in Pooh's Favorite Things about Spring, credited to writer Kathleen W. Zoehfeld and artist Robbin Cuddy. (That book is so popular, Disney also abridged it as Hello, Spring!, a Random House Pictureback Shape Book, in 2001.)

(Pooh Project: Phase 2! I've managed to catalog all the shorter Pooh books my family owns (see the list here). While I work through few remaining longer Pooh books we own, I'm missing my daily dose of Pooh, so I'm going to start seeking out some of the Pooh books I don't own – yet – from libraries IRL and online. See the reviews here.) ( )

The little facts in the margin are a nice touch, but rather distracting for kids on a first read. ( )