Seasons Turning

Review also includes:

High Tide, Low Tide, *****, ‎978-0749641818

Story of a Storm, ***, 978-0749641801

When the Sun Goes Down, ****, 978-0749641795

Watch Out! Builders About!, ***, 978-0749647865

Manning and Granström know how to capture the interest of young learners. These books provide children of about 5 to 8 with an exhilarating first look at the chosen topics. The main narrative is in large, bold print with extra information included in italic. There are particularly lively suggestions for further research and activities. Each book is crammed with wonderful pictures, often labelled and sometimes quite small in scale, which might well inspire children to write and illustrate their own nature journals. All this creates great variety on the page and gives each book its own flavour. What the books have in common, though, is that they reveal a dynamic, ever changing world.

Seasons Turning reinforces the linking of each season with the next. So we start and end with winter as ‘cold as penguins’ feet’. The sights, scents and noises of each season are brought to life in words and in detailed pictures of flora and fauna. The visual and the verbal combine equally well in High Tide, Low Tide. The quality of the double spreads with annotated illustrations makes this my personal favourite. The picture of wading, tide-following birds like oystercatchers, godwits and curlews has a particularly strong imaginative appeal. The small, beautifully drawn and labelled pictures of sea plants and sea creatures are likely to please and inform young readers. There is also guidance on how to make a map of a well-liked seaside place. The setting for Story of a Storm is the open countryside and farmland. We learn about the impact of a storm on both the people and the animals, including some beautiful heavy horses – ‘The wind grew stronger lashing the rain against fur and skin!’ I just felt, however, that in a strong series this was a little slighter, a little lighter on content than some of the other books.

When the Sun Goes Down shows us a dark landscape and the activities of animals and people through the night. The text and pictures indicate the movements and sounds of nocturnal animals – foxes chasing prey, cats prowling and bats as they ‘flutter and squeak’. There’s a charming little diagram here showing echolocation and lots of extra visual details to encourage talk. The excitement and slight menace of night-time comes over well. Watch Out! Builders About! shows a landscape in the process of transformation. Perhaps this book lacks the minutiae which appeal to children and are so evident in some of the other books in the series. We nevertheless learn much about the process of turning wasteland into housing, what the builders do at each stage and the machinery that is used.

These books would provide inspiration inside the classroom – particularly in science and geography lessons. The labelled and annotated diagrams would be helpful in the literacy hour as examples of non-fiction illustration. Such lively and intriguing books would also be much enjoyed at home.