Book Review | 2 Kurious Kids by Heidi Gill

2 Kurious Kids by Heidi Gill is an adventure series for kids ages 3 to 8. Siblings, Hannah and Jacob love to take imaginary trips around the world, exploring each country at a time and learning new languages and experiencing new cultures.

On their first imaginary adventure, they travel to China. They imagine what their typical day may look while living in China. By the time they were on their fourth trip, they were visiting India. Most of the illustrations in both books were almost the same with variations in food and activities; in China children like to participate in gymnastics while in India they like cricket. Gill’s series emphasize that people are basically the same in their daily routine wherever they are in the world.

Though this is true, there are still variations in our daily lives that make our experiences culturally different. It would have been nice to see more activities and places that are indigenous to these cultures both in the story itself and in the illustrations, such as a market place scene or children at play using a type of toy that is native to the culture. This would illustrate that even though we are similar in most instances, there are some things that are only unique to various cultures.

Nevertheless, Gill does a great job in educating readers on the everyday words commonly used in all languages. For example, readers can learn breakfast words like cereal and milk, and at school words like chalkboard, teacher and pencil. The language characters and the word pronunciations are included, making the series wonderful starter books ideal for kids being introduced to a new language.

Teachers can demonstrate the language characters for kids to learn how to write them, giving kids a more hands-on approach and making the experience of learning a new language more appealing.

Look for more books in the series - Hannah’s and Jacob’s trips to Egypt, Mexico, and France!

Happy Reading!