Richard Scarry’s What Do People Do All Day? is a great introduction to a very funny children’s author and illustrator.
Summary: An entertaining trip around fictional town “Busytown” with detailed illustrations explaining how different industries function, using stories to elaborate. For example, Betsy Bear writes a letter to her grandmother who lives in another town. Pictures show the path of the letter from Betsy’s desk to Grandma’s front door, via the post office, sorting office, bags, mail aeroplane, more sorting and a local postman. There is a theme to the animal characters which means many are familiar throughout the book. For example, the grocer cat who buys the fsrmer’s produce is also the grocer who reports a banana theft to the police, and who lives next door to the new house being built. His son, Huckle, is the cat rescued in a fire by the fire brigade. Through simple 2-4 page stories, a whole world of knowledge is shared.
Best thing: The humour. The illustrations. The not-at-all-textbook way that it teaches such a broad range of content in easy to understand format.
Time to read: Kids will keep finding more and more detail in this book, we read some of it daily for weeks after we got it, and it is still a regular in the reading list. We are finding new pictures, new information and new jokes every time we read it. It has 64 pages, is mostly pictorial, and if only reading the words (which would be a terrible waste) it would take less than an hour to read.
Pages: paper
Age range: Our two year old loves reading the book a few pages at a time, and as adults we have learned a surprisingly high number of things about how industry and infrastructure work.
Buy or Borrow: Buy. This is the kind of book which will be extremely well thumbed by the time its owners have grown up.
