Some reference books are written especially for young readers. But don’t be surprised if adults helping out with the homework don’t find themselves irresistibly thumbing through their pages.
Here are three recent ones:
The World Almanac for Kids 2007 (World Almanac Books).
The standard version of The World Almanac and Book of Facts, which has been around since 1868, is a thick book with no-nonsense blocks of text and columns of statistics. The children’s version is quite the opposite – a vivid, heavily illustrated volume with snippets and chunks of information, lists of facts and attention-grabbing graphics.
The contents page serves as a guide to general topics with sections that include books and buildings, holidays and homework help, money and music.
And if all those facts start to overwhelm, breaks are offered in pages of jokes and riddles, fun quizzes, and word-connect, word-search and sudoku puzzles.
Time for Kids Almanac 2007 (Time for Kids/Time, Inc.).
This one also offers plenty of fun stuff, but quizzes and puzzles can be educational, too.
For the fact-seeker, there are chapters on newsmakers, buildings, geography, health, science, the United States and the world, among other topics, along with an index.
The variety of information includes a comparison of the planets, thumbnail sketches of U.S. presidents, the alphabet in American Sign Language and tips for taking tests (none of which includes writing answers on your palms).
A guide to using the Internet tells kids how to conduct research on the Web and how to use the Internet safely.
The Perfect Pop-Up Punctuation Book (Dutton Children’s Books) by Kate Petty and Jannie Maizels.
This clever book entertains youngsters with its playful pop-ups while it gives lessons in basic English punctuation.
By lifting flaps and pulling tabs, kids learn how to start and end a sentence, how to use quotation marks and exclamation points, and what the difference is between a colon and a semicolon.
Comma jokes give examples of how a misplaced or omitted comma can change the meaning of a sentence, sometimes with amusing results. And there’s a test on apostrophe usage with answers and explanations hidden under flaps.
The book is designed for ages 7 and older, but it can also serve as a refresher course for adults who become “comma-tose” when they try to remember their grammar-school grammar.
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