Materials; Water

A step back in time with these two titles from Watts' 'First-hand Science' series aimed at the lower end of Key Stage 1. You find yourself looking twice at the copyringht date to check that these haven't been around for 20-odd years with their extraordinarily dated artwork - warm and fuzzy for the central characters and starkly airbrushed for diagrammatic marginal pictures. Typography too combines a more contemporary style of hand-lettering, tricky to read for the age group, with standard type, frequently surrounded by question marks or exclamation marks. Long wordy descriptions of practical projects take them way beyond the readership. The content itself is sound, but the delivery is offputting and outdated. Plenty of better introductions to science are to be found in the publisher's own catalogue.