Daddy Mojo used to teach. Being an ex educator he’s interested in many things about education, such as teaching policies, best practices and bureaucracy.
The extent to which children think about animals crossing the road stopped when they answered the question about the chicken. And even then that query, and its many derisions, are tiresome, repetitive, and work for the five-year-old audience one time only. Wildlife Crossings: Protecting Animal Pathways Around the World is an illustrated book that will fascinate elementary ages and get them to think, yes actually think about something that they’ve never thought about before.
For a period in every elementary student’s life, they are factoid machines. They have competition between themselves to seek out and parrot one or two-line facts about animals, the more disgusting, bizarre or unknown, the better. This is the age of the exception. Kids may not be able to tell you how many ounces are in a pound, but they’ll be able to tell you at a moment’s notice that you swallow an average of 1,500 pounds of food a year. A Tour of the Human Body: Amazing Numbers-Fantastic Facts is an illustrated book that introduces elementary-aged students to this bag of flesh, organs and bones that accommodate us during our time on Earth.
Somehow or another, Exoplanets: A Guide to the Worlds Outside our Solar System snuck past my review radar. Oh it landed in our office, but it gravitated towards our reference books and not in the ‘new’ books to review area. Exoplanets prematurely made its way into our ‘forever’ book stack, instead of the working book column that gets cycled through and written up. It certainly would’ve helped had we read Exoplanets when it was initially released because at that time we were planning our 2023 Dragon Con interviews. At that event we chatted with a handful of scientists researching conditions on various planets and the propulsion methods that astronauts would use to get there. Even though Exoplanets is an illustrated book, a medium that’s stereotypically thought of as a children’s book; it’s testament to the equally correct belief that just because the book is intended for children, it can reach far beyond its target audience.
Space, the frontier is calling you.There’s something about the cover to Little Mouse’s Encyclopedia: A Picture Book About The Wonders of Nature that perfectly translates how easily the book can cross over to different ages and cultures. It’s from the perspective of a little mouse, albeit a very intelligent one, who is exploring the things around her burrow. All the while a narrator is providing some expository comments as to why she’s doing things, in addition to offering smarter-than-expected facts about the flora and fauna that the mouse encounters on daily basis.
https://amzn.to/3WgR1y3Size does not matter. Size does not matter. I’m talking about the size of certain books, and size does not matter. The content in books with a bigger presentation could be just as impactful if it were printed on standard paper, it doesn’t matter. Now, let us come back from fantasy land and lay witness to Bugs: A Skittery, Jittery History by Miriam Forster with illustrations by Gordy Wright. Bugs is a massively oversized statement of a book that lives somewhere between an illustrated book, a reference book, a STEM book, and a great, goodnight book. This book is impossible to ignore and presents biology to young audiences in a way that’s irresistible, curious, and motivational.
I just finished a contract where I was teaching advanced French to high school students. It was great practice for my guttural language skills and allowed me to read their library of French books. In this class library was a couple of dozen children’s books of all ages, with many of them being aimed at lower elementary school. I love it when I teach a foreign language and the teacher has a library of books in that language for students who are learning it. Dia de Disfraces is one of those illustrated books that are great for Spanish classrooms for a couple of reasons.
Having taught a couple of classes to middle school grades about World War I, I know that the subject can be confusing. The time spent on WWI for most middle school classes is very brief, with more time allowed for the Treaty of Versailles, especially for those lower grades. Those ages know about the mythos of the flying ace, even if they get hazy on who were the Allied Forces and what were the causes that led to it. Above the Trenches is a graphic novel in the Nathan Tale’s Hazardous Tales series. This entry is specifically about the flying aces that took to the skies in WWI and how they came to shape this new form of combat. Ironically, the most famous WWI pilot, the Red Baron doesn’t factor into Above the Trenches that much. Instead, the graphic novel is about the Allied Powers and their build-up of the foreign legion and the men who jumped into this relatively new mode of transportation.
There is a difference between a good book and a fun book. Good books don’t necessarily have to be fun and those fun books don’t always have to be good, in a literary or personal sense. You may read some tawdry summer beach love book about teenage vampires or romantic solo vacations to the edge of the world and they are 100% your jam, and others might not view them as good, but they sure are fun. Plague-Busters! Medicine’s Battles with History’s Deadliest Diseases is a fun book that’s laden with dozens of illustrations and snappy text that makes the world’s low points accessible, without watering down their scale.
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