Wheels and Wings

The Time-Life series, "A Child's First Library of Learning," is a useful resource for parents and their young readers. The focus is pretty straightforward, as the title suggests. This series features a question and answer format, addressing a series of issues related to the book's focus. To illustrate, the first question in this volume is "How do you keep from falling when you ride your bicycle?" Answer? Be balanced in your seat and keep moving ahead--or you'll have trouble! This question-answer is on pages n4-5. Other features include different types of cycles (unicycles, four wheelers, sidecars, etc.). Other questions in the book, to give a sense of its scope: "Why do fire engines use sirens when they go to a fire?", "Why do big trucks have so many tires?", 'Where can we travel on trains?", "What is the world's fastest train"?, "What makes a ship move?", "How does a helicopter fly?", "How does a hot-air balloon fly?", "When will we travel in space?" One nice feature: At the end of the book are some interactive features, getting your child to become more involved. It's kind of cool, as I'm looking at this volume, to see my son's writing on pages 86-87, when the question becomes "What kind of vehicle am I?" Anyhow, this is a nice book for young readers. It can help parents interact with their kids. A decent option. . . .

These series books are so consistently great! This one is about cars, trucks, trains, planes, etc -- so is rather technical compared to the animal and insect books. Children will probably need to be approaching 4 years to really start to take this in, and I expect boys would be more interested than girls (I understand the pros/cons on generalizations, however, I observe that my grandson likes anything with an engine or wheels, but my daughters never were drawn to these kinds of topics. Your girl might be). Very, very well done. Stunning photography and wonderful illustrations including cutaway/cross-sections. Excellent "how things work" explanations. Side note teaching prompts for parents, and a record keeping section in the back to log a child's learning experiences and progress. Recommended, as are any of the books in this series.