#23 Great Global Puzzle Challenge with Google Earth

Title:  Great Global Puzzle Challenge with Google Earth

Author:  Clive Gifford

Illustrator: William Ings

Publisher:  Kingfisher

Copyright:2011

Pages:  29

Genre/Category:  Nonfiction

I love this book. It is nonfiction, but this hardly defines it. It is an interactive book, a hidden objects book, and a fact book all rolled into one. This book is made to be used with Google earth. I have never seen anything quite like this book. Every two-page spread is about a particular place on the globe. You enter in coordinates into Google Earth to look at the locations in real time. When you’re done with that, there are facts about the location and hidden objects to find on every page.

This book is done in a very cartoon-style. The illustrations reminded me of the Where’s Waldo type illustrations. Every page is jammed packed full of minute details. The layout is very informal, with the text fitting into small boxes and being incorporated into the illustrations. The colors are very warm and bright with a lot of yellows and oranges, and some cool blues and greens thrown in. 

I think this book would be appropriate for upper elementary grades, such as fourth and fifth and above. Younger students would also like this book because it is interactive, and parents or older siblings could help them read the text and enter coordinates. I think this would be a great book to use with technology in the classroom. I think it would be really neat to be able to talk about one of the places mentioned in the book and then to pull up the aerial views on Google Earth. This would also be a good book to give a student who doesn’t like to read, as it relies heavily on pictures.