Zoom Dinosaur Adventure and Zoom Rainforest Adventure – at a glance
The School Reading Lists’ five word review: A brilliant introduction: bold & colourful.
Children’s book title: Zoom Adventure series.
Children’s author: Susan Hayes.
Children’s illustrators: Sam Rennocks and Susanna Rumiz.
Genre: non fiction board book.
Published by: What On Earth Books.
ISBN: 9781912920457 & 9781912920396
Recommended for children aged: 1+
This edition published: April 2021.
This children’s book is ideal for: reading, sharing and exploring with children aged 1+.
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Our review:
‘Now, what I want is, Facts! Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts.’
So snarled Mr Gradgrind in Hard Times.
People in charge of ‘education’ love facts. Their acquisition can be measured easily. What could be more simple, or desirable, than squashing facts into children and have them spew out what fragments they can remember in an exam?
There is now a suggestion that languages can be ‘taught’ by providing students with a list of 4000 words to learn. Useful words, of course, like business, profit, lobbying skills, greed, more, more still. This, it is thought, will help us ‘keep up’ with ‘our competitors.’
The best way for young children to learn anything from books is to sit with someone who cares for them and have fun, and these two ZOOM books are written with energy and humour.
Zoom Dinosaur Adventure and Zoom Rainforest Adventure provide plenty of scope for imaginative talk, jokes, enlargement of the stories and incidents and discussion about the creatures and plants which inhabit them.
The complicated and unfamiliar names of pre-historic animals are given as small labels, so that they can be explained, or left until later, depending on the reader. This also makes the books ideal for siblings to share, to use as a text for reading buddies in primary schools, or to revisit in years to come.
The child characters find themselves in dramatic situations, but they are not in any way threatening. The pictures are bold and colourful; each book has a surprising fold-out page at the end.
Both these books are, I think, brilliant introductions to the world as it was millions of years ago and to the rainforest, as it is now.
Also in the Zoom series:
Zoom Space Adventure – Ava and her cat journey into space | Zoom Ocean Adventure – Noah has an underwater adventure. In November 2021, two more titles will be published – Zoom Building Site Adventure and Zoom Farm Adventure.
Many thanks to What On Earth Books for the review copies.
If you like the Zoom Adventure series you might also like: our list of dinosaur topic books, our environment and climate change topic books, Shark Super Powers by Jillian Morris & Duncan Brake, our collection of picture books to read before you are five and our list of books for reception.
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