Kids Story Books

Archive for the ‘Architectural Books’ Category

This book called Great Building Stories of the Past is a great book for children to read and learn about buildings of the past and their stories. The book is by Peter Kent and it is published by Oxford University Press. This book has very cute illustration and the stories are easy to read. Kids will have fun reading this book. The book is big and measures 12.3x9.7x0.3 inches.

Table of Content

• Great Pyramid
• Great Wall of China
• Beauvais Cathedral
• Eddystone Lighthouse
• Brooklyn Bridge
• Eiffel Tower
• Panama Canal
• Woolworth Building
• Chek Lap Kok Airport
• Great Buildings around the World

Great Building Stories of the Past

Great Building Stories of the Past

From School Library Journal
Grade 4-6-This well-researched book spotlights architectural feats and explains the purpose of the building and the engineering involved. Kent includes the Great Pyramid at Giza, the Great Wall of China, Beauvais Cathedral, Eddystone Lighthouse, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Eiffel Tower, the Panama Canal, the Woolworth Building, and Chek Lap Kok Airport in Hong Kong harbor. The inset drawings explain complex architectural details in straightforward text. Many of the illustrations use human figures to show scale and provide length and width measurements of cross-sections. While describing complicated ideas, the text remains clear and well written. Many libraries may own books on some of the structures covered here, but it's helpful to have so many in one volume, especially when the illustrations and text are so well done.

Great Building Stories of the Past

If your children are fascinated by great buildings then this book called The Visual Dictionary of Buildings is a great book to read. It is by Eyewitness Visual Dictionaries, Dorling Kindersley or DK. The book is large and measures 10.25x12.25x0.35 inches. Each page has lots of pictures, photos, and illustrations. The part that I love most about this The Visual Dictionary of Buildings book is that every picture is marked with the name of what it is and what the other things in it are. Have you ever looked at a picture or a building and wondered "what is that thing called?" Well, if you have this book, you will know what they are called by their proper names.

Buildings (DK Visual Dictionaries)

Table of Content

• Ancient Egypt
• Ancient Greece
• Ancient Rome
• Walls
• Roofs and Chimneys
• Medieval Castles and Houses
• Medieval Churches
• Gothic
• Renaissance
• Baroque and Neoclassical
• Ceilings
• Arches and Vaults
• Domes
• Islamic Buildings
• South and East Asia
• Doors
• Windows
• The 19th Century
• The Early 20th Century
• Modern Buildings
• Architectural Styles

Visual Dictionary of Buildings

This book is another book that I found on the subject of architecture for children. It is called the Random House Book of How Things Were Built. It is also a hardback, large book. It is an illustrated history of ore than 60 of the world's greatest structures - from the Great Pyramid to the Golden Gate Bridge. The book measure 8.75x11.6x0.6 inches and it is by David J. Brown, published in 1992. It is a thick book with lots of pages to read. Although there are lots of pictures and illustrations on almost every page, the book packed full of information and facts that the kids will spend a long time reading.

Table of Content of How Things Were Built

The Ancient World

• Early Dwellings
• Catalhuyuk
• Step Pyramids
• Great Pyramids
• Egyptian Temples
• Mesopotamia
• Agamemnon's Tomb
• The Parthenon
• Theatre at Epidaurus
• The Sixth Wonder
• Stonehenge
• Great Wall of China
• Roman Roads
• The Colosseum
• The Pantheon
• Early Basilicas

The Age of Discovery

• The Hagia Sophia
• Durham Cathedral
• Chartres Cathedral
• Salisbury Cathedral
• Florence Cathedral
• The Tower of London
• Old Amsterdam
• Machu Picchu
• Wooden Buildings
• The Leaning Tower
• Westminster Hall
• Angkor Wat
• Old London Bridge
• The Taj Mahal
• St. Paul's Cathedral
• The Royal Crescent
• The Mosque at Djenne

The New Technology

• Ironbridge
• Menai Straits Bridge
• Crystal Palace
• Galerie des Machines
• Forth Rail Bridge
• The Eiffel Tower
• The Sagrada Familia
• Early Skyscrapers
• Empires State Building
• The Hoover Dam
• L'Unite D'Habitation
• Sydney Opera House
• Habitat, Montreal
• Sydney Harbour Bridge
• Golden Gate Bridge

The Modern World

• The Pompidou Center
• Olympic Stadium
• Hong Kong Bank
• The Channel Tunnel
• A New Bank
• A New Town Hall
• La Tour Sans Fin
• Kansai Airport

For each building in this book, the book goes through explaining what the building is for and how it was built with illustration for each stage of the building. It is very educational to read this book. Not only the kids learn about the world's history but they also learn how important buildings were built. And, by knowing how they were built, the kids can remember facts about them better. It is probably not what this book is intended for but my kids became fascinated with history after this and they also found ways to memorize facts using the visual aids of this book. So, overall, this is a great book.

How Things Were Built

Recently, my kids are into buildings. When we drive places, they often ask me what style each building is, when it was built, etc. Well, I always tries to answer as much as I could but they just want to know more. The more I tell them, the more they want to know so one day I decided to get them some books that will answer their architectural questions. Let me share some of these books with you. This one is called Children's Literary Houses: Famous Dwellings in Children's Fiction. They picked this one out themselves because it is big and it has lots of interesting pictures of buildings.

The book measures 8.5x11.3x0.6 inches. It is a hardback book by Rosalind Ashe and Lisa Tuttle and researched by Talia Rodgers. It is published by Facts on File Publications and copyrighted Dragon's World Ltd in 1984. Almost every page has cute illustration either in color or in black and white. Below is the table of content of this Children's Literary Houses: Famous Dwellings in Children's Fiction so you know what they have in there. In each chapter, the children can learn the story of the classic tale as well as see the beautifully drawn or sketched pictures. Some chapters even have maps so you can put things in perspective, find out where the secret garden is, etc.

• The Secret Garden
• The Sword in the Stone
• Little Women
• Charlotte's Web
• David Copperfield
• Johnny Tremain
• Robinson Crusoe
• Alice in Wonderland

There is a lot of writing in this book so it is not for very young children. But they will enjoy looking at the pictures in the book so parents can read the stories to them if they like.

Children's Literary Houses

My kids were into architecture recently so I got a lot of architectural books for kids. They are not that easy to find, amazingly enough, since most architectural books out there are not made for kids to read in particular so they are a little more complex and do not have many pictures. But, I did find some and I will post on this Blog.

This book is called The House I Live In (At Home In America) and it is by Isadore Seltzer. It is a hardback, large book which measures 10.5x9.25x0.25 inches. MacMillan Publishing Company published it in1992 so it is a little old but it is still nice and fun to read, not to mention educational too. There are 25 pages in this book and they are all colorful with lots of pictures and a lot of text to read too which is unusual for an architectural book. The book also gives information about each home and how it was built.

Each double page features a type of homes such as:

• an adobe home that is seven hundred years old, designed by the Pueblos Indians
• a stone house made of stones of different sizes and shapes
• a log cabin house in Montana
• a fairy tale brick and plaster house in a borough of New York City
• a Spanish style, Hollywood home
• a houseboat that really never lands
• a mobile home
• a beach house for those who want to spend almost all day outside, on the beach
• a skyscraper apartment building with a bird's eye view

You can read about all of these buildings and more in this book of stories about the houses and styles of houses that people live in America.

The House I Live In At Home In America

The House I live in at home in America

The House I Live In At Home In America