Jan 16, 2012

How a House is Built

I got How a House is Built (CAN, JP, USA), written and illustrated by Gail Gibbons and published by Holiday House, when we built our house in 2010. Then I packed it to move. It wasn't seen again until I uncovered it when putting our Christmas decorations away.



It's a little late for showing my kids the steps to making our house come to fruition, but a really good resource nonetheless.

The book goes through the process of building a house from the ground (crawl space) up, touching on all the different parts of the process, from plumbing to framing. The colourful pictures make it easy for kids to understand the new vocabulary. What I like is that there are women actually working on the house, which let me tell you, did not happen on our house. It's nice for my kids to be able to see that women can do any job they put their mind to.

Our house is built western style so I really only thought the bath and our tatami mats were different from the book. My kids, however, asked where the solar panels on the roof were!

Gail Gibbons is the queen of the nonfiction picture book, with over 100 titles published and more to come. I can see why, she has an excellent sense for how to convey fact to small children with appropriate vocabulary and interesting pictures. I will definitely keep my eye open for more of her books.

This was my 2nd picture book for Nonfiction Monday for 2012, hosted by The Swimmer Writer this week.

4 comments:

  1. Hi, I've been quite remiss, I haven't heard of Gail Gibbons yet and I confess to not having read any of her over 100 titles as yet, will definitely remedy that as soon as I visit our local library. :)

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  2. Yes this looks great! We have a bit of an architecture fetish at our place. Hope to pass on that passion to the little one too.

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  3. I love Gail Gibbons- her books are always a great place to begin when learning about a new subject. As their dad is a builder, this book is one of my boys' favorites!

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