Children's Space Books Books

Environments for Outdoor Play: A Practical Guide to Making Space for Children is a a how-to guide written for anyone responsible for children's outdoor play settings at schools or child care institutions. Recommending solid ideas for developing play environments that meet children's needs, chapters discuss frameworks for designing play environments, case studies offering examples of how play environments can be developed, ideas and activities, research evidence pointing toward the importance of good play environments, and more. Black-and-white illustrations add a visual touch to this handy resource, indexed for quick reference.

Space has always held a fascination for mankind, and Peter Ackeroyd's Voyages Through Time: Escape From Earth provides an easy introduction to human journeys into space, packing in the illustrated pages of information boxes and reference material. This could easily have also been featured in our Children's Bookwatch, but Voyages Through Time deserves mention and recommendation for a wider audience than just a young adult readership alone, as it offers considerable appeal for readers of all ages.

This science book was great! i learned alot from it. i am a 8th grade student and i would LOVE to tell the world that Mr. Trudelle (Paul) is the best science teacher ever! he has tought me so much and he has tought me with inspiration and good helth. i love him because he is a great teacher. that you alot and i think that you schould read this execelt book and learn alot just like it did. thank you!

As soon as we opened this book, my inquisitive 5-year-old was hooked. It is filled with interesting facts about our solar system, written on a level just perfect for ages 4-8 (the target age group for these books). The pictures and graphics are rich and colorful. I bought "Ocean", too, and now we often read these books instead of good-night stories. Each 2-page spread contains so much to see and discuss that it takes the place of a standard good-night story.
Here's an example: "A planet's year is the time it takes to make one full journey (orbit) around the Sun.... Planets with the biggest orbits have the longest years." For a kid who is just beginning to comprehend how long a year is, it's interesting to toy with the idea that a "year" is a different amount of time on each planet. Ok, it's a stretch, and I don't think my 5-year-old really understood, but that's just one example of the types of things we sit and talk about after looking at this book. Fun!
So if your child is curious about the sun, moon and planets, I would really recommend this book. (Even for older kids, frankly. My mother and I both enjoy it and learned from it. And it's much more interesting to read and look at than a typical story book.)

I have always loved astronomy, and was hoping to share it with my children. I love the DK books because of their wonderful pictures and simple explanations, perfect to get kids excited, even great for the beginning adult. This would be a perfect book to go along with a first telescope and a star chart. Great book!

This is a fascinating collection of stories featuring creatures from the deep seas, deep caves, and deep space. Every story ends with a life lesson. The illustrations are fabulous and include many details. At the end there is a resource section with notes about the different creatures featured in the stories. A great gift for all ages!

The haunting York trilogy continues in "Faces in the Water," picking up the threads that the first book left dangling, and weaves them expertly into further complexity.

Dan has returned from York with some haunting memories of the odd gypsy family of Ambrose Faw, visions of Romans and Picts, and the discovery of a hereditary family disease. Now he's determined to leave the unusual vacation behind him, and spend some time with his kindly grandmother Blossom. But his time in York keeps intruding on the present.

His grandmother has hired a migrant worker named Lonnie, who reminds Dan of one of the gypsies from York. A letter comes from Joe, saying that the Faw family wants the silver denarius that was given to Dan at the end of the first book. Blossom makes some cryptic comments about Huntington's disease being an "evil" handed down through the family. And when Dan goes into the basement, where a stream runs through, he sees the face of Ambrose Faw watching him from the water.

When a magpie begins following him, Dan captures the bird and later sets it free. He is swept back in time over a thousand years, to York in the declining years of the Roman Empire, where he encounters an ancient parallel to the Faw family. How does this connect to the present, and how can he help the beautiful gypsy Orlenda?

The plot picks up the pace in "Faces," as some of the puzzles of "Shadows" are solved, but produce more questions as they are solved. For example, we see why Dan saw Jaspar as a wild man; but why does he see the Faw family sixteen hundred years in the past? What is the connection between these events and Huntington's disease? Or the connection between Blossom and the Faws? And what is up with those magpies?

Naylor's atmospheric writing is still present, with the nuanced dialogue and intricate characterizations of the first book. Not everyone is revealed on the outside, and that adds an aura of mystery to all the characters except Dan, who is our window to the events of the book. And though time travel is a well-worn cliche, Naylor manages to make it feel fresh and intriguing. It's virtually impossible to predict what is ahead for the characters or the plotline, and that's a delightful change from the usual ghost stories.

Undoubtedly "Footsteps at the Window" will be as good as "Shadows" and "Faces," as the second book leaves the readers waiting for the answers to its many questions. Excellent fantasy story for kids and adults alike.

Typically the Amulet Books imprint of this publisher are featured in our Children's Bookwatch issue - but A HISTORY OF WESTERN ART is simply too good an introduction to the cultural legacy of western art to limit its readership to young readers alone, and deserves a place in the libraries of any collection strong in introductory arts titles for all students of art history and for none-specialist readers with an interest in art regardless of their age. A HISTORY OF WESTERN ART: FROM PREHISTORY TO THE 20TH CENTURY is lavishly illustrated with over two hundred color reproductions of art pieces, photos, and supporting documents, offering an intensely visual approach which captures the essence of world art trends and progression.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch

My 2 year old plane fanatic loves this book which has large pictures on every page of planes, helicopters, airships and hot air balloon. I have tried to find a similar book but cannot find one with such great pictures.

Gerald Durrell's books, The Fantastic Dinosaur Adventure, and The Fantastic Flying Journey are two of my family's favorite books. Gerald Durrell wrote over 35 books, mainly for adults, about his real life adventures all over the globe collecting animals for zoos, primarily for the zoo he founded, and funded through his books, on the island of Jersey.
Durrell had a life-long love of animals, first described in his book My Family and Other Animals, an autobiographical account of his unusual childhood, growing up on the island of Corfu, where his mother brought Gerald (age 10) and her three older children, at the badgering of the eldest, Lawrence Durrell (author of The Alexandria Quartet), in order to escape the cold, wet weather of England.
The Fantastic Flying Journey and The Fantastic Dinosaur Adventure describe the adventures and mishaps of "Great Uncle Lancelot" and the Dollybutt children, Emma and her twin brothers, Ivan and Conrad. In The Fantastic Flying Journey, they travel around the world, in a self-contained eco-system house, carried by a hot-air balloon, the Belladonna. Great Uncle Lancelot has persuaded Mrs. Dollybutt to let him take her children with him, while he searches for his brother Percival. Percival had invented some special powder which enabled the wearer to speak to, and be understood by, animals. Thus they were able to trace the route followed by Percival. It's a charming tale, relished by young and old.
Our daughter's third grade teacher used the book as part of a year-long project, because it encompassed so many topics.
The Fantastic Dinosaur Adventure is the story of the second journey made by Great Uncle Lancelot and the Dollybutt children, as they travel back in time to the Age (actually there are 3 ages) of the Dinosaurs, to help save the dinosaurs from an evil Dinosaur hunter who has stolen a time machine. Saving animals from hunters and from extinction due to the destruction of their environment was a real-life theme for Durrell. It was/is the purpose for his zoo, and he was the first person to impress upon zoos of the world a need for a calling greater than entertainment, i.e., to teach people about animals and to help save animals from extinction by founding breeding pairs to keep the species alive.
Durrell's warm humor and love of animals permeates his books, which are both entertaining and cleverly educational. The illustrations in both these books heighten the readers' enjoyment.