I love big picture books for kids. The importance of classification in a child's mind of the world around him is to me the cornerstone of education. We are here to make sense of the world around us. To find the joy in that process of classifying and organize the chaos we are born into can begin in infancy with a great picture book. As a toddler learns language and begins with her own classification process of the world around her we see how engrained into our psyche the cognition of naming things and classifying things in our world is to our comprehension of everything and our place here on planet Earth. One of the books that I found children and adults love is "Animalium" a big book by Big Picture Press. This book is Currated by Katie Scott and Jenny Broom and is part of the Welcome to the Museum series.
Animalium is a beautiful book filled with hand drawn picture of animals formatted into the classifications in the book as if you are walking through the galleries a a museum on natural history.
Each catagory of animals is in a chapter of the book.
The illustration are beautifully rendered. The books text is simple enough for a primary or elementary aged child but even a very young child can enjoy the pictures. This book is priced at $35.00. It can be bought at several vendors. If you think of books like this as a reference book for you library that can be passed down through generations of you children to their future children it's not so expensive. This is not a book I will give away but a learning resource my family can uses for generation. This series is that beautiful.
The next Big Picture Press reference book I wanted to share is "Maps" by Aleksandra Mizielinska and Daniel Mizielinski.
Maps is a picture book of drawings.
The Table of Contents. This is a simplified version of a world atlas for children.
Each continent is covered and each Nations page dipicts cultural life, national resources as well as geographic highlights. The language is simple but the subject foot notes are in cursive. This can be fun to for learners to practice their skills of language in a beautifully printed book.
The final book I am reviewing in this series of Big Picture Press is "Historium" another Welcome to the Museum children's reference book. "Historium" by or curated by Richard Wilkinson and Jo Nelson is book that shows children artifacts of the world by continent. For over 100,000,000 years human beings have been make and creating objects and art. This book shows a charming introduction into archaeology by allowing the child to classify art objects by continent and time frame.
From scratches on a rock in Southern Africa to the artifacts of Easter Island, your child will have an excellent reference of artifacts and creative materials from around the world.
This books also has a index of image credits where you can teach our child more in research and credible sources. This could be followed up by virtual tours often found on musuem's web sights and by following the names of the world greatest museums to their web sights for more learning we are teaching all kinds of research and study skills.
