Busy Bots, a board book that turns tools into animals

When is a board book not a board book? I’ve asked this riddle before, but it deserves to be asked again. Busy Bots is a board book that occupies one of the interesting corners of the crawler book library. It’s a STEM-minded board book that turns real tools into insects, animals or pretend animals that will leave ages two through seven grinning for multiple reasons.

Busy Bots engages those young brains by also being a search-and-find book. The various things that one would find in a garage are mangled together to create pictures that look like critters. Kids will see a frogbot made up of a car jack, radiator key, and round yellow light.  They’ll also see a roarbot, who looks a lot like a lion, made from four large drill bits, a hex screw, spring, and two smaller screws for the eyes, naturally.

This is early mind, STEM-happy playtime for those crawlers who like things silly, while their parents might want them to learn to love how things are built. The illustrations are all happy, large, colorful and will leave kids seeing the natural pattern of things outside of the book.

It’s win/win for the kids and the parents. Certainly, the only place that they’ll see a dogbot is in their Busy Bots board book. However, kids will smile to themselves as they look at the pictures. The images are raised off of the book’s pages just a little bit too. This provides kids another chance to use the tactile senses in their fingers that desperately want to touch these creations.

This isn’t just for gear heads. There are common household tools, like an iron, headphones, colander, hammers, fans, and forks to name a few that are incorporated into the creations. Busy Bots is a bigger-than-average board book. That’s worth mentioning because this isn’t the small, square board book that they might be used to. This is a larger board book that’s friendly, but not too babyish that could give kids the ability to see art in uncommon things or to simply make them more aware of the physical components of things around them. Either way, it’s a victory for kids and adults.

Busy Bots was made by Rhea Gaughan, Natalia Boileau and Kylie Hamley with illustrations by Jo Ryan and available on Priddy Books an imprint of St. Martins Publishing Group.

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