Scavenger Guides Chicago (An Interactive Travel Guide For Kids)
By Daniel Ireland
Three Leaf Press
Copyright © 2010
ISBN: 978-0-9845866-0-8
132 pages
$12.95 / Black & White at Amazon.com

When travelling, kids don’t want to see things, they want to do things. Scavenger Guides Chicago addresses that need by offering a guidebook designed and written for kids. This guidebook is meant to be used more than consulted and, ideally, become a lasting memento of a trip to the windy city. A travel guide, game, journal, photography course, and souvenir all in one.

Kids score points for each question they answer correctly or activity / experience they complete—ten points for finishing a slice of deep dish pizza for instance—and they try to earn as many as possible for the trip. At the end, their accumulated score rewards them one of three rankings—Travel Guide, Travel Adventurer, or World Explorer—for which certificates have been included in the book to be authenticated with adult signatures.

The narrative and site descriptions are informative but concise and, more importantly, written for children. The chapter on taking photographs is more involved but well-constructed; many adults would benefit from its well-articulated basic hints. The accompanying black-and-white photographs—I suspect color would have made the cost of the book prohibitive—are set at an angle, an intentional quirkiness suitable for its intended audience. The overall layout of the pages is nice to look at and the amount of white space makes them inviting even to those adverse to reading. Wide margins encourage spontaneous note taking.

The chapters are arranged by topic, such as Buildings and Landmarks and Parks and Outdoor Search, rather than geographic itinerary. The guide recommends reading the book prior to the trip for planning purposes. I would go further and say that the simplicity of this guide might make it a better tool for sketching out an itinerary than conventional guidebooks. Better yet, the kids can get involved. One chapter I’m sure would be popular is, Chicago Animal Safari, which nicely combines the two zoos and the Shedd Aquarium.

An animal safari in Chicago? You bet! Chicago is a great place to see animals! Take in a dolphin show at Shedd Aquarium’s Oceanarium, one of the city’s most popular attractions. Then get a diver’s eye view of sharks in Wild Reef. Lincoln Park Zoo is one of the oldest in the United States. Stare into the eyes of a lowland gorilla, try your hand at milking a dairy cow, then ride the Endangered Species Carousel. Lincoln Park Zoo is open 365 days a year and admission is free! Brookfield Zoo, in the Chicago suburb of Brookfield, is one of the largest zoos in the United States. It was the first zoo in America to exhibit giant pandas!

A one-paragraph description on each destination follows, along with several fill-in-the-blank questions. These are relatively easy things to complete, depending on the child’s age, but pose enough challenge to demand some effort.

Scavenger Guide Chicago is one of a planned series on American cities—a Washington, D.C. version is available—and so there will be generic elements. In fact, these make up about one-third of the book and include: blank pages for notes after each chapter; lined pages for journal entries for fourteen days, along with a sample; pages for parents to create their own clues and scores and a page to accumulate the scores; the certificates; the aforementioned photography guide; and of course introductory pages on the guidebook itself and recommendations on how to use it. This is a first edition, implying, as with other guidebook series, updated versions will be published in the future to reflect destination changes as well as, presumably, improvements based on feedback.

A website supports the book and its users / readers. It contains a blog and a feature to create a Digital Story, along with basic site information. For the type of book it is, it would be nice to have distinct web pages for kids. Perhaps this will happen once the Scavenger Guide builds up some steam.

It’s unfortunate the author did not insist on providing a hardcopy because I cannot comment on ergonomic aspects, such as the type of paper and what writing implements would work best, ease of carrying around in daypack, weight, etc. Clearly, such a book would get tossed around and would have to survive page-tearing winds, puddles, and other elements. The effect of the occasional widow and orphan is hard to assess with the electronic version; I noticed them but might not have with the physical book. I don’t know if the certificate pages are perforated or not (but I doubt it).

Scavenger Guides Chicago is targeted to parents and children but to me a natural and possibly larger audience would be schools and clubs that arrange trips to major cities. True, the guide seems geared for longer stays, but there may be a larger market there. I could see value in a customizable version too, something that’s more feasible with self-publishing.

While the contents fulfill the intent, the ultimate proof of concept will be to look at a copy at the conclusion of a trip. If still in new condition, then perhaps it hasn’t been used properly, the trip was bad, or the concept is off. A tattered, marked up, saved copy, on the other hand, would be a clear indicator of success.

A recent fascination with my own backyard birds has led to a fun summer hobby. I now have six bird feeders in my yard, and have purchased 3 various books all about birds. I even made a trip to the zoo recently well, just for the birds. So, I immediately began searching Lulu for good bird books. Although I found several-mostly coffee table photo type books-one of the best is called BIRDS, and it’s put out by a publisher calling itself TheTeachersDesk.info.

Let me say right now that I really only found two negative things about this book. The first is the book cover. The book is targeted towards teachers of K through 6, but the book lacks all appeal judging it by the boring two color sky and water photo with not a bird in sight. All of my bird books have a bright colored bird on the cover, one has four birds and a feeder. If the title of this book was not BIRDS, then I’d probably mistaken it for one of those Christian pamphlets that gets left on my car from time to time.

Second, judging by the content I think some of it is either passed the 6th grade, or too broad of a spectrum for information taught in a basic K through 6 curriculum. Should a sixth grader even be taught from the same book as a 5 year old? The book contains a nice coloring book style picture of a bird which is a diagram pointing to the various body parts of a bird. This is perfect for K through 3rd grade I’d imagine.

It’s followed by a very simple “Bird Classification” table that ends with the phrase, “Not all flying animals are birds; and not all birds can fly.” I could see this as a poster on a 3rd or 4th grade Science class wall (maybe). The classification information continues with an outline of kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species. I vaguely recall covering this in 5th and 6th grade. Next is a list of bird orders like Anseriformes and Coraciiformes. I don’t remember ever having to learn scientific names of animals until my Freshman year of college, but I could be wrong.

So those two things being said, let’s talk about all of the positive aspects of this teaching tool.  It’s filled with both black and white and colored photos that are very nice and appealing.  It also has quizzes and reviews at the end of each section, labeled “elementary” and “upper elementary.”  There’s even a true and false type quiz using bright yellow smiley and frowny faces.

The information provided in each section is very compact and precise, and simple to comprehend which I think is important for kids who might have shorter attention spans.  My personal favorite part was the “beaks” section which compares different bird beaks and their primary use to household kitchen tools and various items such as nutcrackers, scoops, nets, and spears.  If a teacher gathered these items for show they’d have a great visual lesson for kids!

There are also suggested projects divided by lower and upper grades such as “build a bird” and various reading assignments.  There are web links to listen to bird calls and songs.  There’s even a section with some quick drawing lessons from a fun cartoon bird made from two circles to a more complex duck with lots of detail.  For teachers who prefer worksheets, there’s coloring pages, word searches, connect the dots, and mazes.  It wraps up with two pages of bird jokes (all kid friendly) and an answer key for the quizzes.

One slight problem near the end is the “Bird Links” section where the links are hidden behind the titles of the sections.  I was reading this in PDF from my Lulu account so I could not click on the words and get them to link to the sites.  There are other websites mentioned throughout the book which give the actual dot com address and are much more user friendly.  But I’d also like to note that at the bottom of a few sections, there is an email address you can write to to receive a free classroom poster that corresponds to that section.

So, for a recent bird fan, I found this book to be informative and entertaining, and worth much more than the three dollar price!  For teachers wanting to spend a few weeks in the classroom getting students to learn all about birds, this teaching tool pack is a must!

With my recent issues concerning the creation of the book cover for my own next book, it seemed only fitting that Todd Fonseca’s The Time Cavern would be my next book review. Todd used 3D software and Photoshop to create his cover, and I must say it is outstanding. I have only seen it online, so I can only imagine how spectacular it must look in hand. Congratulations, Todd, on your excellent achievement.

I immediately think of the phrase, “judging a book by its cover,” as I write this. Face it. We all do it, which is all the more reason for a POD author to spend so much time on making their cover appealing and eye catching. I hope that Todd’s hard work pays off because readers will definitely not be disappointed with what’s behind this cover.

As the story unfolds, the reader is introduced to a ten year old boy named Aaron who is camping on his own for the first time. Of course, all ten year olds have a wild imagination and long for a sense of independence, so Aaron immediately begins to worry about the sounds he hears outside the tent. He also senses that he is being watched. Fonseca dedicates the book to his own son, also named Aaron. As I nestled into the story, I imagined the author creating this story as a bedtime tale for his son. If that is the case, the author has done an excellent job of transpiring his story to the page.

Aaron decides to investigate the noises outside the tent, but before doing so, he records his thoughts in a notebook. Here, we learn that Aaron is actually camping in the backyard of his new home, in which his family just moved into the day before. The beginning of the story is set up as a nice metaphor for the entire book. You may be frowning at the thought of yet another time travel story based on the title alone, but the young protagonist leaving a big concrete city and moving to the corn fields of Amish country makes for a nice set-up in my opinion which many young readers can relate to.

Fonseca has a talent for appealing to a young audience in the use of his subject matter….independence, moving to a new home, making friends, being afraid, exploration, and the use of the imagination, etc. Outside of the young boy’s adventures the author also uses a nice mix of dialog to keep his story moving, evenly exposing the reader to other characters including Aaron’s parents.

Aaron soon forms a friendship with a neighboring girl named Jake, who tells him his house is haunted. This sends Aaron into a frenzy to investigate the noises he’s been hearing, along with the mysterious eyes he sees in the old family barn. While exploring the barn, Aaron finds the page from a diary of a young boy who lived over 100 years ago. The writings on the page echo the mysterious feeling Aaron has been experiencing…”hearing your name being called by the wind.”

The next day, Aaron seeks out Jake to ask her about what she had said about his house and what she might know about the mysterious wind. He shows her the diary page he found and the two begin a journey they will not soon forget as they set out to solve the mystery of the Amish boy who wrote the diary entry, the howling wind that whispers your name, and an ancient cavern filled with even more secrets.

Todd Fonseca’s book is an adventure story that both kids and adults will love. It feeds the imagination, just as the tale itself builds upon the eagerness of its characters to solve the mystery. Fonseca’s main characters, Aaron and Jake, are believable and come alive on the page through their real-life dialog and eagerness to learn the truth. The author does a great job of keeping the momentum going with nicely paced conflict and interest, which will definitely keep the pages turning.

The Time Cavern is the first part of a three book series. Learn more by visiting Todd and The Time Cavern online!

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