Title: My Big Book of Outdoors
Author: Tim Hopgood
Illustrator: Tim Hopgood
Publisher: Walker Books
Genre: Younger children’s non-ficiton, Outdoors
Book format: Hardback
Sweet Strawberries: 
Description: Discover the joy of outdoors in this richly illustrated treasury that celebrates the wonders of nature.
From the vibrant colours of flowers in bloom to poems about dandelions and raindrops, this bright and beautiful collection is jam-packed with amazing things to see and do outdoors.
Depicting the splendour of the four seasons, this gorgeous book is the perfect introduction to nature in all its glory.
*Free copy provided by publisher for review…
Review: This is such a lovely book with so many things to learn and do! ‘My Big Book of the Outdoors’s is wider and a bit taller than A4 in size and is a heavy book, almost coffee table size, being in hardback and filled with lots of thick matt pages of illustrations and text. Under the dust jacket are some lovely extra illustrations. The book is all about the different seasons and the things you can find outdoors in nature at that time.
The book is arranged into four sections, Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter and within each season there are lots of different pages about the different things that you can find in nature during that time. At the start of every season there’s a page about what to look out for in that season such as falling leaves during autumn or icy lakes and ponds during winter. After that every season is filled with many pages about that season, some informative pages, some poems and some pages are things to make! Some of the informative pages include information on subjects such as, birds eggs, what ant nests look like, the cycle of frogs eggs to frog, cloud formations etc. Each of these pages is filled with only brief text and some lovely illustrations and I love how easy the information is to pick up and how much I loved learning about the different types of ants in a nest or conifers, etc. which I didn’t know.
Some of the pages are filled with poems, some rhyming while others don’t. These poems sum up perfectly the mood of the season you’re reading about and I especially loved the poems about the rain and the rainbow. Apart from that the book also features quite a few pages of things that children can do, such as making chocolate bird nests (which sound delicious!), crest heads, leaf mobiles and bird feeders. All of these makes are simple and easy. I love fun these are to make and I can remember making similar things like the butterfly pictures and snowflakes when I was a child so I know these makes will be things children will enjoy creating.
While the book’s text is good it’s the illustrations that really make this book special and capture the mood of the seasons so well. I love the mix of paint and print, and how colourful all of the images look. Every page has so much colour which fits with what the page is talking about, and there’s something just really wonderful about the way the images look, I just couldn’t take my eyes off this book, wanting to look back at it again and again, which I’m sure many kids will want to do too. Some of the illustrations have extra things to spot like chickens or insects in the background which just makes them extra fun to look at and you can spend ages just enjoying looking at one page/double page (or at least I did!).
Overall this is a brilliant book for children teaching them a lot about the outdoors and in a very fun way that will hopefully make them love and want to explore nature, and with so many fun activities to do too, it will keep them entertained for a long time.
What do you think of this book? Do you or your children like spending time in the outdoors? Let me know what you think in the comments below 🙂
The Strawberry Post 