Facts! One for every day of the year by Tracey Turner illustrated by Fatti Burke

 

I do enjoy books that follow this format - a poem for every day of the year; a word for every day of the year; or a fact for every day of the year.

Facts! is a book you could share in a family or in a classroom or in a school library. In the library the daily fact could be used as a jumping off point for research or for a discussion about how to approach a research topic using key words; searching for web sites with authority; and exploring ways to narrow or refine a topic search. Your class could begin their own trivia book - aiming to collect another 365 fun facts! You could also design a way to organise all of the facts your students discover over the year.

There is no index or glossary in this colourful book and that might be of concern to some librarians but the search for information on a specific topic is not the purpose of this book which is sure to delight all collectors of trivia and of course this book is perfect for fans of The Guinness Book of Records. Each double page spread covers several days and some facts, which are circled, present events on specific dates.  This is not a book to use for the topic "On this Day" but rather it is just a miscellaneous collection of facts from every discipline - science, maths, geography, astronomy, history, biology and more. 

Publisher blurb: Discover a fact for everyone, everyday, in this book. Explore a world of topics, from hilarious animals, to unbelievable-but-true science facts, mind-blowing space stats, to incredible human achievements. You can even look up what extraordinary event happened on your birthday!  Did you know that Ancient Romans used wee to whiten their teeth, and to do their laundry? Or have you heard of the parrotfish, which covers itself in a cosy, thick layer of its own slime before it goes to sleep? Why not celebrate New Year's Eve like the Estonians: tuck into seven meals to give you strength for the year ahead. Delicious.  It's most important to know that you should never shake hands with a bushbaby: the animals pee on their paws so that they leave a smelly trail wherever they go. Find out all this and much, much more, with enough facts for even the most curious reader. Also includes seasonal and 'on this day' facts for added curiosity and fun, plus a completely random mix of everything else you can imagine.

Here are a few fun facts:

• Smallest car ever produced was 140cm long, 100cm wide and 120cm high. It is called a Peel P50.
• Cockroaches can live up to a week without their heads!
• When you are eight years old your brain is already the same size as it's going to be when you are an adult.
• Tin food was invented in 1810 - 45 years before tin openers!
• There is enough iron in the human body to make a 7.5cm nail.

As suggested in the blurb I checked out my birthday - On this day in 1859 Charles Darwin's book The Origin of the Species was published. 

You can see other books illustrated by Irish illustrator Fatti Burke here. 

Here are some other books by Tracey Turner. It seems pretty clear she loves collecting facts and trivia and she loves to organise her findings: