Away We Go! Review

Away We Go! arrived one afternoon as the kids were warming up.  We’d been out to the medical office for Kallista to get the ‘flu spray.  She was NOT happy about it!  We stopped at the library on our way home and got caught in a torrential downpour on our way home to make a stressful day even worse.  We were all soaked through and cold so the kids were warming up after having to run through dirty puddles to cross the roads home.

The doorbell rand there was a package for me!  Always exciting, but even more when it arrives separately from the rest of the daily post.  I took it in to show the children and we opened it.  They loved the bright colours of this book and its theme and wanted to read it immediately!  So they stopped playing and their attention was directed towards this book completely! (We received a copy of this book in exchange for a review containing our honest opinions)

The sturdy cardboard pages make Away We Go! durable and it will last not only for my own children, but for many years of childminding/babysitting as well.  The cut-outs are fun for the children to peek through and they wonder what will be on the next page.

“Octagon” is now Tristan’s favourite shape, and he’s learned the connection between ‘oct’ and 8 for the 8 sides and corners of an octagon, and the 8 tentacles of an octopus.

We were in Belfast a couple of days after receiving this book and I asked the children to keep their eyes open for any shapes they may see, and not just in vehicles.  There were lots of shapes, just in the first block that we walked!

Last week while we were touring the fire station, Tristan noticed that there were lots of shapes on the fire engine, so he used my pocket camera and took a few photos of the shapes he saw from where he was standing.

Chieu Anh Urban is a graphic designer and you can see her background at work in this book that was originally started as an animal project.  It then evolved into the shapes and transportation book that it has become.  It’s amazing how many vehicles can be easily made of of simple shapes alone!  Kallista had lots of fun finding all the shapes in the pictures and at the end of the book she likes to name them all in the vehicle round-up.

“I enjoy creating fun, innovative novelty books that provide playful exploration of early concepts.  I believe kids learn more if they have fun activities to go with story time, and I wanted to have available a range of shapes and transportation activities and coloring pages to enrich the their lesson.  My goal is to create an exciting shapes and transportation experience for the kids.”

Chieu Anh Urban has created several fun activities to go along with this book to keep your youngsters busy.  You can see everything she has available on her website, here.  Tristan and Kallista have been busy for days working on these activities.

Tristan has really enjoyed doing Tangrams for the last year, and this is a fun extension of that in a way.  He and Kallista like to re-create the vehicles in this book using shapes that I’ve cut out of construction paper and cardstock of various colours.  I used the cut-outs in the book as stencils!  I’ve put these shapes in an envelope and they are in the children’s home education folders so they’ll come out about once every week or two as a fun colour, shape, and math activity.  By using them as an easier form of a tangram, they can be used for ages.  Kallista will enjoy copying pictures while Tristan works on math, or they can both enjoy them free-form.

I love to hear the big stories Tristan comes up with to explain his pictures!  His is a house with the sun, moon, and Mars, and he had a whole story to tell about his picture.  Kallista has made a house and a garage.

If you’d like to see more of Chieu Anh Urban’s creative ideas (including her party printables), you can find her on her blog; Chieu Anh Urban Facebook, and Pinterest.

We’ve previously done a few shapes activities that could be done along with this book.  You can see them here:

• Learning with Shapes Crackers
• Making Christmas Cards with shapes

If you’ve liked this book, please see our reviews page, as well as our books and book activities page for more ideas!