This new coffee-table format kids book, The Animal Awards: Celebrate NATURE with 50 fabulous creatures from the animal kingdom, by Martin Jenkins with illustrations by Tor Freeman*, is a rollicking riot of excellent information about (fifty) animals, with fun illustrations.

The ceremony is about to begin. Roll up, roll up, roll up! The ceremony is about to begin so prepare to be amazed. We’re here to celebrate the crème de la crème of the animal kingdom, and shine a spotlight on the finest achievements and unique qualities of some special individuals. Among others, we will be awarding prizes to the fastest, the oldest, the strongest, the smelliest, the tallest, and the longest. We have some unusual prize winners and some quite scary ones, too. As we run through our short lists you’ll have the privilege of meeting our esteemed guests from dangerous, frogs to organised ants, to spiders that have devised all sorts of strange and admirable ways of catching their food. It’s been a really difficult job choosing winners but we hope you approve and find plenty to marvel at in this beastly line-up of champions. Now put your hands together and clap! The Animal Awards is about to begin…

Tor Freeman is a London-based illustrator. In 2012 she was awarded the Sendak Fellowship. In 2017 she won the Guardian Graphic Short Story Prize. Her books include the Digby Dog and Olive series.

Martin Jenkins is conservation biologist and children’s writer. His jobs have varied greatly: “I’ve been an orchid-sleuth in Germany, a timber detective in Kenya and an investigator of the chameleon trade in Madagascar.” His titles include Emperor’s Egg, winner of the Times Junior Information Book of the Year Award, Can We Save the Tiger, winner of the SLA Award, and Gulliver’s Travels, winner of the Kate Greenaway Medal. He lives in Cambridge and London.

This new book is smaller, has fewer projects, requires the purchase of fewer components, is an accordingly less expensive book, and perhaps most important for some people, requires no solder!

The projects consist of a steady-hand game, a touch enabled light, an alarm you can put on your cookie jar or similar container, a night light that detects when it is dark, various sorts of blinking or party lights, a musical instrument, and of course, an LED Marquee. You need just over 20 components to build all the projects, which mainly use breadboards. The book suggests which parts to buy from Jameco, and many of the parts come in one or a couple of Jameco kits. (Jameco company sells individual electronic parts, like the old Radio Shack, and also, kits you can use to make cool stuff like an Infrared Escape Robot or a Dual-Output Adjustable Linear Regulated Power Supply.)

All the instructions are clear, the illustrations are excellent, and the projects are fun, if a bit basic. This is well within the range of a seven to ten year old kid with adult supervision, and without the adults for ten and up. Depends on the kid, of course.

What I like about this book is that there are traditional circuit diagrams accompanied with descriptions of how the electronics work at a basic level. For many of the projects, you are expected to use the breadboard to assemble the parts using the traditional diagram. This is a much better way to learn the way circuits work than many other guides or books, which hold your hand through assembly at the cost of holding your hands through understanding. In many cases, there are photographs of the assembled project with sufficient detail and clarity to get you past any ambiguity. But, the key is this: The circuits are both interesting and simple, so nothing can go wrong.

There are also sections for many of the projects that help you past when something goes wrong.

There are many places these projects can go, on modification, and there is plenty of inspiration in here to lead to interesting results. I highly recommend A Beginner’s Guide to Circuits: Nine Simple Projects with Lights, Sounds, and More!, perhaps as a holiday gift for a young one.