This collaboration between Nosy Crow and The British Museum is a great addition to our ancient civilisations books, and a fabulous mix of three of the Fae’s Faevorite things; picture books, non-fiction and search and find books.
Tom’s grandmother is an archaeologist and has a cat called Digby.
One day Tom goes to her workspace and she gives him a cloth bag and an amulet, which just happens to whoosh him back in time to Ancient Egypt BUT Digby pops out of the bag and Tom chases him across the desert and city observing the lives of the people around him until he finds his granny who is glad to hear he has had a nice time and they return home to the present day.
Both girls LOVED this book and the story of a boy and his magical amulet that sends him back in Time was magical enough but then adding in finding activities in the lovely soft illustration style was a great idea with both concepts being a great lead in to the non fiction elements.
The concept of blending non-fiction into a narrative is of course not new but this twist of making it accessible in picture books then adding the search and find element is basically genius.
The style hooks attention and maintains it throughout the subtopics and cleverly the search and find pictures make reference to the facts and information and have bonus find elements that relate to the bitesize information.
The wonderful part of this us that this book is accessible across a number of ages/abilities; my younger daughter (3 years) can infer information from pictures, whilst my 6 year old has the opportunity to build on this inference by extracting information whilst being entertained by the story.
It’s a great low pressure and playful introduction to historical knowledge books as Tom travels through the Ancient Egyptian society observing a range of daily, social, economic and political life with a glossary to support the knowledge and encourages deep diving into more Ancient Egypt books such as So You Think You’ve Got It Bad? A Kid’s Life in Ancient Egypt by Chae Strathie & Marisa Morea.
I would highly recommend this for children from young preschoolers up to KS2 who are interested in search and find and/or non-fiction to enrich their collection.
Find Tom in Time: Ancient Egypt by Fatti Burke is published by Nosy Crow
Thank you so much to Nosy Crow for sending me this review copy.
This sounds like such a great idea and the illustrations look ace.
Have the girls read The Great World Search? It’s an old Usborne title, I’m not sure it’s still available (I’ve certainly not seen it in recent years) but it would be worth keeping an eye out for – each double page is an illustration of a different location with lots of facts and things to find in the picture around the edge.
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Thy sounds fabulous!! I will have to keep an eye out for this!!
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