I have shared with you before how much I am loving Instagram lately. I’ve found a great community of people with similar interests around women in engineering, STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Math) experiments and activities for kids, and STEAM children’s books.
I also have been lucky enough to win several giveaways through this community on Instagram. In December last year I won a Giveaway from Here We Read and Charlesbridge Publishing for Baby Loves Aerospace Engineering and Baby Loves Coding books.
My kids and I have been enjoying these adorable books for a few months now, so I wanted to finally share my review of these two books with you.
Note: This post contains affiliate links. You may read my disclosure here.
Baby Loves Aerospace Engineering and Baby Loves Coding are both written by Ruth Spiro and illustrated by Irene Chan. With simple, clear, and relatable words and illustrations, these books are a great way to introduce young kids to aerospace engineering and coding.
Let’s start with my review of the Baby Loves Aerospace Engineering book. This book begins to introduce aerospace engineering through birds. I thought it was a great idea to start with a simple question that many young kids wonder: how does a bird fly? My kids were fascinated by these pages!
Then the book begins to expand this concept into airplanes. Airplanes fly like birds, but don’t flap their wings, they use engines. This was interesting for my kids since we’ve flown in many airplanes.
Finally the book finished with talking about rockets and how the big engine in the rocket produces hot gas upon take off. This was my daughter’s favorite part of the book since she wants to be an astronaut when she grows up!
We loved this adorable, entertaining, and educational book. I learned along with my kids and I liked how the kids did not even know they are learning, they are just enjoying a cute new book!
We have read and reviewed several children’s books featuring coding (see my Baby Code and Rox’s Secret Code book reviews), so you’d think I’m a coder myself. The truth is I still don’t know how to code, but I’m enjoying learning about it with my kids.
I think coding is so important for our kid’s generation to learn because our lives are so digital now. There is no escaping digital life, and being able to code will be a valuable skill no matter what career path they ultimately choose to seek.
I was excited to get another book about coding to share with my kids. I hope all these coding books will make coding seem natural and simple to them.
Baby Loves Coding introduces coding by explaining the concept of algorithms and how a baby’s toy train works.
Introducing alogortims is something I hadn’t seen before in the previous coding books, and I thought it was explained in a clever way for children to understand.
It was explained though the baby taking a pattern of steps to get from the toy train tracks to the toy box. My kids liked helping me count the color-coded steps while we read the book.
Then the algorithm concept was later tied to the computer in the toy train. They explained that the programmer writes the code that the computer in the train the steps in the algorithm telling it what to do.
I thought this is a great way to explain coding, by showing it in an application the kids will easily understand. They have plenty of remote control toys, and this is explaining how the computer in the toy reads the code to understand when to go or stop.
Even though these books are called “Baby loves…” and are board books targeted primarily to babies, I thought my my toddler and preschooler were at great ages to appreciate these books.
My toddler daughter understands all the words and concepts in the books (much better than she would have at one), and she loves looking at the cute babies in the illustrations.
My preschooler son is in the early stages of learning to read. And since these books have very few and simple words, they are great for him to use to practice learning to read.
We enjoyed these two cute books and learned a lot while reading them too.
If you’re interested in purchasing either of these books for your own kids, you can find Baby Loves Aerospace Engineering on Amazon by clicking here, and Baby Loves Coding on Amazon by clicking here.
Have you read either of these books or do you plan to read them to your kids?
