Sooner or later your four year old is at a window seat, or standing at a fence with a plane coming down over the top of it, and the question arrives: where do the wheels go. This is the book that answers that one.
Rabbit, Bird and Mouse work an airliner from the check in desk to the landing, in rhyming couplets, with Ant Parker's bright labeled art under Tony Mitton's verse. It costs $6.99 and it takes about six minutes to read out loud.
The science it actually teaches
Here is the honest read, because this shelf is worth nothing if I inflate a book to move it. Amazing Airplanes does not teach how a wing makes lift. There is no air pressure in it, no thrust, no drag, nothing anybody would call physics. If you are buying it to get flight explained, buy something else.
What it does teach is naming and sequence, and both of those are real work at this age.
The words are the actual words. Cockpit. Landing gear. Runway. Control tower. Cabin crew. Baggage. A child who has had this read to them eight times owns those nouns and uses them correctly, and that is a head start on every aviation book they pick up at eight, because there is nothing made up to unlearn first.
The order is the other half, and it is the part people undersell. A flight is a procedure, and the book runs it in the true order: bags loaded, passengers boarded, taxi out, take off, wheels up, cruise, come down, land. Sequence is most of what science looks like before a child can hold a cause. First this, then this, then this, always in that order. A picture book that gets the order of a real procedure right is doing that job whether or not anyone calls it science.
So, accurate naming and accurate sequence. Not mechanism. If that reads like faint praise, go look at how many books for this age get the naming wrong.
The child it lands with
The machine child. Three, four, five years old, already sorting vehicles into kinds, wants the name of the thing and gets irritated when you guess. This is their book, and they will ask for it until you can recite it.
The other one is the child with a flight coming up. A week before an airport is when this book earns its price twice over, because the sequence in the book is the sequence they are about to stand in, and a child who knows what happens next at an airport is a different traveler than a child who does not.
It does not land with a confident second or third grader. See below.
One place to stop and talk
Stop on the take off page and ask what the wheels are doing. A four year old can answer this one: they go away so the plane is smooth. Hand them the word drag while they are still holding the idea.
What to know going in
Nothing in this book will frighten anyone. No death, no peril, not one dark page. The caution is about fit, and it is a real one that will cost us sales.
The store bands this K to 3. The reading level supports that. The book does not. This is a chunky board book with a handful of rhyming lines per spread, built for a three to five year old on a lap. Read it to a second grader and you will get a polite face. Read it to a third grader and you will get an eye roll, and worse, they will decide the shelf it came from is for babies.
Buy it for the bottom of that band or for a child below it. If your seven year old is reading chapter books, this is not the airplane book you want, and I would rather say so than sell you $6.99 of disappointment.
Where to get it
$6.99 for Amazing Airplanes, and the advice is to time it. Buy it the week before an airport rather than the week after, because the order of things in the book is the order your four year old is about to stand in. If nobody in the house is flying and nobody is under six, spend the money elsewhere on the Stealth Science shelf.
If your child liked this one
Books we have written about that sit close to this one, by reading level and by subject.
Roaring Rockets: One Real Idea and One Correction
Roaring Rockets by Tony Mitton Ant Parker
Grade K to 3
Ada Twist and the Perilous Pants: Why Helium Goes Up
Ada Twist and the Perilous Pants: The Questioneers Book #2 by Andrea Beaty
Grade 1 to 4
Caterflies and Ice: The Book Where Zoey Gets It Wrong
Caterflies and Ice: Zoey and Sassafras #4 by Asia Citro
Grade 1 to 4
Dragons and Marshmallows: The Science and the Catch
Dragons and Marshmallows: Zoey and Sassafras #1 by Asia Citro
Grade 1 to 4
Browse every book we have written about by age, by kind of book and by subject: Find the right book for your child. Or see the whole Stealth Science shelf.
