What's Under the Bed?

Review also includes:

Splish, Splash, Splosh!, 978-0749656867

Manning and Granström are star authors of non-fiction for younger children and these new editions of two favourite books will be in demand. A useful and not too prescriptive ‘notes and activities’ page has been added by Lynn Huggins-Cooper. This gives ideas for linking the books with lessons across the curriculum, especially science, literacy and numeracy.

What’s Under the Bed? explores a simple but brilliant idea: what would we find if it were possible for us to burrow under the bed right through to the central core of the earth? We ‘suspend disbelief’ when we follow two children and a cat on a make-believe journey as they burrow into the underground, enter caves, see fossils, jewels and coal, and then – towards the centre of the earth – find magna and liquid metal. The book deals with big concepts, but everything is so well explained through words and pictures that young readers can begin to understand. So we have, near the centre of the earth, ‘liquid metal, hotter than you can imagine, all wrapped around a cannon-ball-hard core of iron and nickel – just like the hard stone in the middle of a peach’. This book, winner of the TES information book award in 1997, helps children understand diagrams, and how to label and annotate them, much more successfully than do many conventional information books. Children find the cross sections of a volcano, of the layers of the earth and above all of an ant colony (with its demonstration of the usefulness of a key) exceptionally helpful.

Splish, Splash, Splosh! invites young readers to join a boy and his dog as they discover information about water and how human beings use it. Like What’s Under the Bed? it includes fine cross sections – of a u-bend, a sewage works and the water cycle. And there are copious vignettes – small pictures that are such a feature of Manning and Granström’s work – like that of a mountain range deep under the ocean with a little boat at the surface: so simple, but so effective. Above all these books remind us that information can be imparted successfully within the context of a story.