Little People, Big Dreams, Charles Darwin is go-to, smart fun for 4 and up

“This is not a baby book”, I told our nine-year-old. “Are you sure, it looks like a baby book”, he said with an unsure look. I understand why he questioned us. Little People, Big Dreams Charles Darwin looks like a book that demos young, and it can be. It does so in a way that the content is presented younger and certainly speaks to audiences that aren’t of his mature student behavior or the third-grade vintage. To us, it’s a book that takes a very smart subject and brings it down to a level that he can easily understand. This series is fun, engaging, makes young readers think about real people, and does so in a way that second graders can understand.

In this case, Charles Darwin is not a figure that most elementary-aged students will know about. Author Maria Isabel Sanchez Vegara is able to condense his life into a narrative story that shows the events that spawned his curiosity; his studies and travels that eventually led him to his landmark book, The Origin of the Species. She writes many of the books in the Little People, Big Dreams series on Quarto Knows and does an equally impressive job with each of them that I’ve read.

From the moment readers see one of the Little People, Big Dreams books they know that it’s something special. The spine, along with one inch of the left front and back cover has cloth on top of this hardback book. The effect of feeling the cloth and then the smooth hardback cover gives the book a regal feeling. However, it’s skinny like a children’s book, but even a casual glance of its interior shows readers that it respects their growing intelligence.

In Charles Darwin, we meet an elementary-aged student who is content, yet full of questions about the natural world. His teachers were telling him that plants and animals appeared on Earth at the same time. However, the Darwin family is full of scientists, with his father being a doctor and his grandfather being a world-famous botanist. Charles followed his family’s passion into medicine, but couldn’t stand the sight of blood so he studied plants, nature, and animals.

It was on an expedition to Australia and Africa when he noticed subtle changes in animals from place to place. This gave him the seed from which he observed natural selection in the wild and penned his opus, On the Origin of Species after almost a lifetime of work.

Little People, Big Dreams Charles Darwin presents his story in an amazingly kid-friendly way. The drawings are crafted in a manner that is detailed, but not so intimidating. The illustrations take up both pages to their fullest extent. However, the text is limited to being only on one page and is only comprised of a couple of sentences. At most, there are three sentences on each page. This allows young readers to spend time enjoying the art and processing the story in their heads. The economy of text also doesn’t intimidate young readers who might be turned off by too many words or lots of four-syllable words.

There are a couple of bigger words in the book. This is where it, as well as, the other books in the series that I’ve read, really respects the intelligence of their readers. I’m a firm believer in the fact that the vast majority of kids are only as smart as the material that’s presented to them. Sure there’s a time and place for young readers to get their silly’s out with a leisure book that’s going to be relaxation reading.

The sneaky, teacher side of me says that this book manages to be educational, and entertaining. When we read this to our nine-year-old, he was loaded with questions as he and I went over the pages. He wanted to know if Charles Darwin was real if the places he visited were real and how it all mattered in today’s world. Well, hold my juice box. I LOVE hearing our children ask questions like this and Little People, Big Dreams Charles Darwin was just the sort of sugar-topped goodness that made him curious and fed ideas that he didn’t know he had. What’s more, as an educator and a parent, this was him doing the reading and the asking. I dare say that I hadn’t heard about, much less know about Charles Darwin until I was in high school.

It was the fact that he was asking and wasn’t doing so because I was prompting him. This series is great and this particular entry is one that STEM-minded parents will want to keep in their forever library for readers as young at four-years-old.

Little People, Big Dreams: Charles Darwin is by Maria Isabel Sanchez Vegara with illustrations by Mark Hoffmann and on Quarto Books.

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