Look Up High! Things That Fly

In the firm belief that our youngest readers need colourful, engaging primary language books, I hope you have room on your shelf for this one.

Look Up High! Things That Fly has beautiful colour photos showing a jet plane, hot air balloon, glider, water bomber, airship, helicopter, toy plane, and a space station. Each ‘thing that flies’ is described in a four-line rhyme that concludes with an additional sentence that names the flying machine in a sentence that includes a different positional preposition, for example, “The jet plane soars across the sky”.

The rhymes are repetitive, changing only the name of the thing that flies. Soon young readers or listeners will be able to fill in the name of the flying thing and join in the rhyme.

A final collection of four pictures has the text “Look up high! People fly -”. It seems an odd choice to include a person standing on a hover craft, and two girls running with a toy plane: nice pictures but not really pictures of people flying up high. Admittedly, young readers are unlikely to question the choices.

Look Up High! Things That Fly concludes with four fun and easy activities to do with a child to reinforce the concepts of positional prepositions.

Work with your child to make your own book by taking pictures and writing sentences to describe them: Sophie runs across the lawn. Sophie hops over the line. Sophie crawls into the tunnel.

Perhaps a second volume of Look Up High! Things That Fly will include some things from nature, like birds, insects, mammals, and even fish. A book like that could earn a place on a primary language book shelf too.