Catherine Ard Books

Wish Upon a Star gives the reader a vibrantly illustrated insight into our galaxy and beyond. The book looks at stars from a scientific, historical and cultural perspective, allowing the reader to understand the importance of stars across all aspects of our lives on Earth.

Each double-page spread has a different focus and is beautifully illustrated, with short, age-appropriate captions which support the reader in building their vocabulary around the subject.

The early pages of the book have a scientific focus, with pages which look at ‘Galaxies’ and ‘When a Star Dies’. These pages balance easy-to-read insights with some useful topic vocabulary. The book tends to keep the information given fairly brief, giving opportunity for further investigation and research if needed.

The latter pages of the book consider how stars are central to the traditional tales across many different cultures, with insight into Chinese, Maori and the Anishinaabek communities, amongst others.

It is ideal as a core text for topic work around the Earth and Space and would be perfect for Key Stage Two classrooms.

‘Into The Volcano’ is an engaging and informative text full of interesting facts for a Key Stage 2 audience. The book supports the National Curriculum objective of understanding the processes that give rise to key physical features of the world – it describes, in a way that the reader will be able to understand, whilst still using ambitious vocabulary, how and where volcanoes are formed, the different types of volcanoes, as well as discussing their positive and negative effects.

We enjoyed the inclusion of myths and legends inspired by real-life volcanoes, details about books and films that feature volcanoes (both real-life and fictional ones); and stories of artists who have chosen volcanoes as their subject.

Throughout the book, there are fascinating ‘Did you know?’ snippets – for example, did you know that scientists believe that the ‘scream heard piercing through nature’ which inspired Edvard Munch’s world-famous painting ‘The Scream’ was in fact the effects of Krakatau exploding?

This volcano-themed children’s book is a fascinating read from start to finish.