Do you know about Okido magazines? We have been subscribers for years. Okido is an arts and science magazine aimed at 3 – 8 year olds, published every 2 months. Each magazine has a theme – recent ones include Dinosaurs, All About Me, Celebration, Hair and Machines – and the topic is imaginatively bought to life through a variety of games, stories and things to make and do. Okido is the brainchild of Dr. Sophie Dauvois (a multimedia designer and scientist) and illustrator, Rachel Ortas and they now work with a team of talented designers to teach children through bright and fun illustrations.
The Okido team have released some great factual books for kids and we recently got ‘How Things Work’ because, to be honest, I don’t know the answer to that question and my son asks me it a lot! Our guides through the book are Koko and Alex – 2 inquisitive kids who like to see how things work and try and build things. The book is really interactive with games and ideas and poses questions back to the reader to try and figure out by looking at the pictures or by experimenting themselves.
Rather then just explaining things with text and pictures the book gets children to look at things differently – to start to question: how are things made? What materials are they made from? Why are they made with those materials? How materials can change in different circumstances.
The book covers a wide range of subjects – How is a book made? How water can change in different temperatures. What is a machine? How things are made in nature / how we can copy those ideas. Electricity. Light. Sound. How a car works? How TV works? It goes on. And there are so many ideas of how to bring these subjects to life for children – games, experiments, things to make etc.
This is a great book to dip into again and again. It offers great support to subjects kids will be learning at school and makes them fun. I learned a thing or two!
The book is available from Amazon (US and UK).
-Mo x
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