Tag / Richard Scarry

by jo

Richard Scarry’s Biggest Word Book Ever!

It’s back and as big as ever! says the back of Richard Scarry’s Biggest Word Book Ever – and it’s not wrong.

Imagine your biggest book. Now double it. Double it again. You may now be close in size to Richard Scarry’s Biggest Word Book Ever. It is HUGE.

Richard Scarry's Biggest Ever Word Book

We’ve mentioned before about our love of Richard Scarry’s books – memories from my childhood have flooded back on opening them – pictures showing the lives of the creatures who live in Busytown. There are so many activities you can do on each page – spot things, spell things, learn to read some words, play i-spy – the list is endless. We can happily cuddle up and read through several pages of the book while getting some serious learnng in there too. The fonts in the book are good, and the pictures a delight. You can let your imagination do a lot of the work, the scenes from lots of everyday events, from airports to shops, homes, to buildings with everything labelled in that Richard Scarry way.

Oh, and Richard Scarry’s Biggest Word Book Ever is the biggest book I’ve ever seen. Don’t let me understate this fact. The product dimensions (according to Amazon) are 60 x 39.8 x 1.2 cm

At £24.99 it doesn’t come cheap, but as a classic I’d get it – with Christmas coming it’s the kind of thing I’d think of as a special present – and actually you can get it on Amazon at the moment for £16.49 which I think is a pretty good price. There are only fourteen pages, so if your child is a confident reader they’ll get some use of it, but it may be more suitable for a younger child. Personally I think we’ve so much to get through with H it’s going to last us a long time, and I’m sure I was seven or eight when I stopped looking at my Richard Scarry books as much, so potentially H will be the same.

Anyway, for me, a book I can hide behind and sit with H talking about the contents is a winner.

Richard Scarry's Biggest Word Book Ever

We were sent a copy of Richard Scarry’s Biggest Word Book Ever! for the purpose of review. All opinions are our own – H brings out the book to show all her friends when they come to play, which I think shows how much she loves it! 

by jo

Richard Scarry’s Best Word Book Ever

Richard Scarry’s Best Word Book Ever is a fabulous book I remember from my childhood.

Richard Scarry's Best Word Book Ever

Richard Scarry’s Best Word Book Ever is celebrating its 50th Anniversary. I remember this book so well, I think we had it in hardback and I’d spend days looking over the pictures and naming them until eventually I got too old for it.

HarperCollins have just brought out an anniversary edition (priced at a very reasonable £6.99 rrp) which brings back the memories,  which keeps them going for future generations. I’d love to think H will read this until she too decides she’s too old for it which gets passed on to any future children of hers – I believe this kind of thing is known as a timeless classic?

The book has pictures, and is based around Busytown, everything has a name and is labelled, and as your child starts to learn to read this kind of thing is going to be really helpful with learning.

Looking through the pages I don’t remember a huge amount, until I got to the one about painting and drawing with colours and they flooded back. The two paint colours are mixed together to make another colour and to me it looks identical to the way I knew it 40 or so years ago. (gulp)

Richard Scarry's Best Word Book Ever

Richard Scarry comes from America but I didn’t spot any words which felt like this was a US edition. I did spot there were no eggplants or zucchini’s, so maybe they were avoided in the first place?

Richard Scarry’s Best Word Book Ever has pictures on each page and within that you’re asked lots of questions which is perfect for H at the moment. She loves to go through the contents of a page and examine everything so I feel this is a book she’s the perfect age for. She also starts school in a matter of days and I think it will help her a lot with word recognition. There are also lots of counting challenges as well.

If you remember Richard Scarry’s Best Word Book Ever from when you grew up, you’ll probably want to consider it for your child as well.

My best memories are the ones I can pass on to H which don’t feel out of date – this is one of them. I love it.

We were sent a copy of this book for review, all opinions are my own nostalgic ones and honest. This post contains an affiliate link.