Our Animals ¦ At School

These two little books with their robust card pages are new additions to the ‘Around the World’ series, structured round photographs of children living their lives in different countries. Our Animals includes pictures of Isabella taking a cockerel to the market in Guatemala, Saran tenderly holding a rescued pigeon on his family’s farm in Bangladesh, and Barfimoh in Tajikistan riding her donkey to collect water from a spring. In At School young readers and listeners are shown children in India travelling to school by rickshaw, Kenyan children using letters written on bottle-tops to learn the alphabet, and UK children in their school tuck shop which sells fair trade goods.

On the whole, I find that very young children reading about different places and lifestyles across the world are more likely to learn meaningfully if they concentrate on one example in some depth rather than many, more superficially. At School presents rather a wide range of places and situations to take in. Our Animals works better because the appeal of the creatures is universal and something the sharing adult can build on. Nursery teams would find the photographs in these books an attractive and helpful resource for early geography projects like people and places.