By Jerome Martin, Darran Stobbart, Alice James and Tom Mumbray
“Africa is bigger… or smaller… than Greenland – depending on your map.”
This gorgeous book just looks fun from its cover! We love good non-fiction books here, and this one is absolutely brilliant. 100 unusual facts are presented in bitesize pieces with delightful infographic style illustrations, which always really hold the attention of my kids! The facts get one page side each, with a handful getting a double page spread, and cover a multitude of topics – everything from “an underground rainforest is growing in the worlds largest cave” to “fossilized chicken bones will leave a lasting record of human existence” to “arctic foxes are excellent gardeners.” Who knew?!
Each main fact gets a number of related “factettes” on its page, each just a sentence or two long, explaining things further and giving background information. And the illustrations are just adorable and really add to the text and help with understanding.
We’ve been reading Usborne books for ages (who hasn’t?!), and this is one of the best we’ve come across. There’s so much knowledge packed into it, your kids will definitely learn something – and you probably will too! And it’s great for sparking further learning – as an example, Mr6 loves the page that mentions prehistoric giant sloths, and that got the kids wondering, and researching, what other animals had giant counterparts thousands of years ago. It’s a brilliant book and we’re definitely going to be looking out for more in this series!
100 Things to know about Planet Earth can be found at Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com
A Different Way To Go 