Fly Guy Presents: Insects product reviews

Fly Guy Presents Insects has a very attractive front cover. A mix of illustration, photographs and holographic foil. It is bound to draw the attention of a young reader. It is part of a series of readers which cover non-fiction topics that are of high interest to children. I was a reluctant reader as a child and I found that I was drawn to non-fiction more so than fiction. It is lovely to see such high quality readers available for children these days and Fly Guy Presents Insects is certainly fits into this category. I know that I would have just loved these books as a child and perhaps my interest in reading would have grown much quicker.

Fly Guy Presents Insects has a storyline to introduce the factual part of the book. As with the front cover, the book has a combination of photos, illustrations and diagrams to get the information across to the reader. Along with reading the book, there is plenty for a young child to look at and enjoy without necessarily needing to read the words. There are also lots of areas for discussion when and adult and children go though the book together. There are lots of big words addressed in the book and they are made easy for a child to understand. It is not dumbed down for children but presented in such a way that is easy to understand. The phonetic pronunciation for the more difficult words is also added in brackets. This allows children to access the bigger words which will be out of the vocabulary for the target reading age of around 7-8 years of age. As the back of the book suggests, the book will appeal to younger children as well and therefore could be used for an adult to share with their child.

My five year old was able to read some of the text by himself and as a result it was a great chance for us to work together to read the book. As we read the book, we had lots of discussion and he added in questions to extend his own knowledge.

Each page has been presented carefully to allow lots of interesting things to look at and read, while still allowing good spacing between the lines of text. The font is nice and clear and easy to read for children. It is also a good size for easy reading. The illustrations are rather humourous and keep some fun in with the serious factual information.

Something to note is that there are references to imperial measurements such as inches and miles. We do not use these in New Zealand and therefore it would require some explanation to children as they read the book. When I was reading the book with Mr 5, I indicated how long each measurement was. He isn't really familiar with metric measurements either, so it didn't really matter too much.

I love this book and I would be keen to introduce more of the serious to my children. From the response I got from this book, I just know that my children would love to share more of them together.