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Find out moreIf you love learning facts and enjoy quiz books the books in this section will help grow your general knowledge. Most of the books have an extract available to download & a review to help you choose your next book and your next chosen subject!
With this book, you’ll have everything you need to explore the universe, and from the comfort of your own home. It’s full of information on the planets, stars and constellations, together with practical learning activities that can be done in the back garden or your bedroom, from how to make an astronomical torch, to how to take a star trail photo, to how to explore gravity with the help of marbles. You can use the book as a journal, recording your findings as you go, while regular ‘did you know?’ boxes add to the sense of excitement and discover. The design is bright and appealing, with colour photos scattered throughout too, and this is accessible, stimulating and lots of fun.
From its attention-grabbing title to its lively, inclusive illustrations, this is a book which will instantly attract young readers to pick it up and, once opened, they will be completely engaged by this first-rate explanation of genetics. The concept of every individual thing having its own recipe is one that is firmly anchored in what young children can understand from their own lived experience and the facts are quite literally mind-boggling and certainly added to my own knowledge. It had (foolishly) never really occurred to me that we would have genetic links to plants or that a grain of rice could have more genes than a human being. Explaining about “bossy” dominant genes, and what genetic characteristics we share with other creatures and then what percentage we share (99 % with chimps of course) leads to an understanding of how alike we all are- we are 99.9% identical to every other human on earth and yet we are all uniquely ourselves. This is not just an important scientific concept beautifully explained, but, through words and images, it carries the message of understanding, empathy and tolerance for others. An essential addition to school and home libraries.
Winner of the 2010 Blue Peter 'Best Book with Facts' Award. Why can’t you tickle yourself? What is the best way to cure hiccups? Why do buses travel in threes? Loads of questions with some highly entertaining answers fill this information book with a difference. Fun to read, it is also full of some real facts as well as some amusing fantasies. It might even get even the most reluctant reader reading!!
September 2021 Book of the Month | Warning: this is the kind of book you can get lost in. Open at random for a quick bit of browsing, and you’ll find yourself engrossed, turning page after page to absorb its assortment of marvellous facts and weird true stories. Whatever takes your fancy, whether it’s space, animals, sport, vehicles or words or numbers, you’ll find information herein to boggle the mind, all brightly and attractively presented across large colour pages. Fun to look at, fascinating to read, this will prompt all sorts of ‘Did you know …?’ conversations. Great fun!
For over 27 years, Top 10s have been delighting readers with fascinating lists and mindboggling facts. Ever wondered in which country you would find the fastest roller-coaster in the world? Or wanted to know the terrifying size of the biggest shark known to man? Ever wondered who could be the biggest selling musical artist of all time? This is the book for you.Top 10 of Everything 2018 is divided into genres including Epic Structures, Outer Space, Forces of Nature and Humankind, and includes lists, charts and tables to break down the details of each amazing fact. Packed full of photographs and incredible information, this is the perfect book for anyone with a curious mind and an insatiable appetite for facts, stats and trivia.
Who doesn’t wonder how their brain works? This book gives you a guided tour of the human brain (and some animal ones), explaining in brightly illustrated pages what the brain does, and how, demonstrating functions of the cerebellum, the brainstem, the cerebrum and the different lobes (frontal, parietal, temporal, occipital). The information is clearly presented via perfectly pitched text and illustration and is thoroughly engaging, accessible and stimulating. There are tests to try out yourself and ingenious representations of new scientific understanding of the brain. It finishes with a look into the future and what might be next for neuroscience and, having read this, lots of youngsters will be eager to keep learning more.
There are so many beautiful and interesting books about Earth, that you tend to think you have seen all the pictures, watched all the programmes, read all the books, but when you read this book, you will realise you haven’t even touched the sides. It is a wonderfully eye-popping book. Separated into different areas of the earth, and then sub divided into areas of interest, beauty, and fascination. It sparks an interest, like a free sample into a new experience. On each page there is just enough information to tempt you into finding out more through further reading and research, which as a learning tool in itself, is invaluable. The photography is superb, clear, vibrant and detailed. The whole book is packed with so much wonder. It makes you remember what a wonderful and partly unknown planet we live on, but also that however much we feel we have travelled, most of us haven’t really touched the surface. It made me feel rather ignorant of the world around me. The photography really is quite beautiful and it amazing to think that in over 200 pages, there is only a small boat on p59 and a lone house on p175. The anonymous photographers should be commended.
October 2021 Book of the Month | It’s a big world out there and when you’re little it’s difficult to know where to start. The World Book makes it easy. It's a fantastic resource for young minds to get their heads around the customs, symbols, histories and … well, identities of the 199 countries explored within. The Contents page is sub-titled “Where do you want to go today?”, and that’s just what you do - pick a country, head to the page, and within ten minutes you’ve very easily built an accurate picture of a faraway place that one day you may just be lucky enough to visit. You couldn’t give a book such a big title as this without making it a substantial thing to hold. The World Book doesn’t disappoint and is reminiscent of some of the hefty picture atlases that used to lie around my house when I was a kid. There is a little mapping but more helpful are the abundant colourful illustrations that portray each nation. Dig a little deeper and the detailed short paragraphs that zoom in on particular facts and figures provide substance to the uniqueness of the place. The book is very accessible and punchy and I particularly liked its sense of equality and the way in which it is not dominated by the bigger nations. Sierra Leone, for example, enjoys as much space as Greece, and there is as much to learn about Canada as there is the USA. The World Book is a triumph in how it neatly and simply explains the world - even to an oldie like me! It seems there are still countries out there I’ve never even heard of...
Winner of the Blue Peter Book Award 2015 - Best Book with Facts This laugh-out-loud book is bursting with lists, facts, jokes and funny true stories all about silly people, silly animals, silly inventions, silly names and much more. Discover The Great Stink, the man who ate a bike, a girl really called Lorna Mower and a sofa that can do 101mph. Find out about famous pranks, crazy festivals, nutty cats, gross foods, epic sports fails, ludicrously silly words and really rubbish predictions. There are even lots of great silly things to do. Unmissable!
A Julia Eccleshare Pick of the Month October 2020 | Starting with a timeline that stretches from the ‘Big Bang’ to ‘The Modern Age (1940- the present day)’ this is a largely pictorial history covering physical and social developments in big, bold outlines which convey the main messages which are then fleshed out in much greater depth through detailed, fact-filled captions. The topics covered in each of the double-page spreads include ‘Our Home in Space’, ‘The Dinosaur Age’ , ‘Cities, Civilizations and Empires’ and ‘Technology’. The illustrations that convey them determinedly simple which gives the book a welcome, distinctively different look. Find out more about Anna and another of her books, The Mermaid Atlas, in this Q&A.
Pick up this book and just look at what you will find. Crikey! That's dead scary. If all the dead people on earth came back to like as zombies there would be 101 billion zombies in the world. Aagh! Run for your life! Check your worryometer! If you see a tiger shark be very afraid, it will eat you. On the other hand if it's a zebra shark - did you know they don't attack people? Safe! Is there anybody there? Messaging home from outer space can take forever! If you're on Venus, a message sent would reach home in 8 minutes and from Neptune it would take over 4 hours! Better check you're in range. Seeing RED! You'll have to travel all the way to Antarctica to see a red waterfall. It's called Blood Falls and the water is turned red by the element iron. WOW! Top trunks! Find out all the things an elephant does with it's trunk. He would die without it. GAV! GAV! It's barking, literally, a dog bark in Russian. You'll find many of the noises animals make in different languages. WOOF! WOOF! How cool is that!
A fact-packed introduction to all aspects of London. There is a wealth of well-expressed information about history, geography, culture, animals, food and much, much more. Everything is clearly introduced which makes browsing easy. Additionally, there’s an excellent index for looking up something specific. Most valuable of all, there are incredibly useful lists of Best Things including ‘Best Hidden Gardens in London’, ‘Best things You Can Climb in London’ and ‘Best Toy Shops’. The perfect book to provide all the information needed by any visitor to London for the Olympics – or at any other time. Living up to its claim, this book is crammed full of fascinating information about every aspect of life in the capital today and how it links to the great city of the past. Understanding the origins of famous events such as the Lord Mayor’s Show or getting to grips with the history of London during World War Two and the amazing bravery of its citizens will all serve to make any visit to London more worthwhile!
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