If you are planning a holiday that combines planes and small children I recommend this colourful, non fiction picture book to introduce the experience of flying. We bought it for our daughter (who first flew at the age of four months) and its bold, bright pictures and easy to read, simple rhyming text were an immediate hit.
Amazing Aeroplanes describes a plane journey from the moment that you arrive at the airport and introduces all the important elements of travelling by air. It explains how you check in your baggage, the preparations that are made for take off, what happens once you are in the sky and how the plane lands. The wonderfully rhythmic, rhyming text introduces ‘flying’ vocabulary (e.g. captain, co -pilot, control tower and runway) and practicalities (e.g the need for a seatbelt for take off and landing and the fact that landing can be bumpy). A final page entitled ‘Aeroplane Bits(!)’ has a labelled diagram of a plane with easy to understand explanations of each word.
As well as being informative there is a lot of humour in the text and the pictures. I’m very reassured by the fact that the captain and co pilot ‘both know how to fly the plane’ and we find the last page hilarious, the captain and the co-pilot get off the plane before the passengers and are walking away from the plane as everyone else disembarks!
The Amazing Machines series of picture books would be a great resource to have in a reception classroom and would be especially useful for a topic on transport. I would definitely recommend them for any little person obsessed with vehicles!
Amazing Aeroplanes is a great book to introduce flying to young children, it manages to pack a lot of information into the simple text. We haven’t heard the CD as we don’t have a copy with our book.
Age Range: 2 +
Author: Tony Mitton / Illustrator: Ant Parker
There are several other books in the Amazing Machines’ series including rockets, submarines and fire engines which you can also buy as a box set. The whole selection is shown on Tony Mitton’s website.
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