Our latest Book Buddy discovery from Parragon was this fabulous Human Body Factivity pack, which contains a 128 page book that is packed full of fun facts and activities, covering absolutely loads of aspects of the human body in child-friendly form, from cells and the nervous system to digestion, inside your eyes, your skin and even genes and DNA.
It also comes with a 20-piece plastic skeleton for you to fit together and place on a stand, which is a great way of showing children how the bones fit together.
The book starts with a general overview of what makes a human being, asking you how you would describe a human to a visiting alien - the answer, of course, is that there are all different types of humans, with differences in everything from body shape and facial features to hair and skin colour. Pierre had great fun drawing his self portrait and I helped him fill in all the details below.
After seeing that everyone is different on the outside, it was time to head inside the human body and discover that we are all made up of cells. I love how interactive it all is - you are encouraged to create your own cells in the blank space. I love a child's creativity - I wouldn't have known where to begin but Pierre had no problem whatsoever in getting inventive, even creating one cell that looks like a ketchup bottle !
Even the pages that don't have activities are very appealing, with lots of illustrations, bright colours and friendly characters with speech bubbles. I kept checking that Pierre was understanding it all by asking him to repeat things in his own words and I was amazed at how much he was taking in.
When he came out of the toilet exclaiming that he absolutely had to wash his hands now because 1/3 of your poo is made up of bacteria and that is why it smells, I knew that he was absorbing it all like a sponge !
To my total surprise, we sat down for an entire afternoon and spent about three hours going through the entire book together from cover to cover. I kept asking Pierre if he wanted to stop and the answer was always no !
The activities make it really engaging and there are also a few fun experiments to take the learning out of the book, from running around the room to feel your pulse increase to constructing a hand out of a rubber glove, straws and string to show how tendons work. I can't wait to try that one out !
I love how child-friendly and fun it all is, explaining some fairly complex concepts in simple and entertaining ways. Pierre giggled his head off when he drew his picture of what we'd look like without a skeleton to hold us all in place, before asking if we could make a jelly for dessert !
We both laughed when checking the answers to some of the true or false questions !
Apparently you fart more as you get older and we both squealed and erupted into giggles when we learnt that you breathe in about a litre of other people's farts each day. Yuck !
There was some serious concentration going on, even for the fun activities. I think I learnt almost as much as Pierre and when Sophie popped down for a snack, she stayed perched on the end of the settee, listening to me reading out the information because she was just as fascinated as we were !
It's a fabulous book, as entertaining as it is educational.
star rating : 5/5
RRP : £9.99
- Paperback: 128 pages
- Publisher: Parragon; Box Nov PC edition (13 Aug. 2015)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1472394313
- ISBN-13: 978-1472394316
- Product Dimensions: 5.7 x 19.7 x 24.8 cm
Disclosure : We received the book as part of the Parragon Book Buddies scheme, in order to write an honest review.
Always fun to learn facts with the kids. A lot of fun and activities. Really good.
ReplyDeleteThis looks really good. I need something like this for all those awkward questions my kids ask
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of awkward questions, the one thing it doesn't even touch on is where babies come from, which is a shame !
Delete