It may not feel a thing like spring around here, but spring training has begun for baseball – and these new baseball-themed concept and vocabulary books will help your child get ready for the big leagues, too.
Baseball Opposites (978 1 77049 518 0)
Baseball Animals (978 1 77049 474 9)
by Christopher Jordan
Tundra Books
From the same team that brought out a series of hockey concept books and Nascar books comes a line of baseball books, for the kid who love summer’s sport. There are plenty of opposite pairings in the first book, emphasized by bold font on the highlighted words and text design that follows the line of a ball’s trajectory, changes spacing, or employs little lines to show movement. This is a nice trick, and though some of the images might need some talking to make it clear what’s happening, hard-core baseball fans may already have a grip on the different between different types of hits, and how fast players have to swing, for example.
Less intuitive is the books on animals, which is laid out as a question about that teaches a little bit about each animals, and then ties it to a team. For example: Q: Which MLB team shares its name with a songbird that loves acorns? (This blue, black, and white bird is thought to be responsible for spreading the oak tree across North America.) A: The Toronto Blue Jays. This is actually surprisingly effective, and I learned a few things about both teams and animals along the way. This is less concept-based, but perhaps more fun for reading together.
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