My Busy Day (Busy Times)

Clare Hibbert is a freelance writer and editor. She is the author of Butterflies and Moths, Out and About, and Real Pirates. Sylvia Raga is an illustrator whose works include Mr. Bickle and the Ghost, Nick's Birthday, and The Sand Dragons.

Plenty of series deal with the passing of time in a macro sense, but the Busy Times series shaves young readers’ lives into the most basic of components and, in doing so, succeeds in explaining the temporal and spatial relationships that are secondhand concepts to older kids. Each volume divides a different span of time (a day, a week, a year, a lifetime) using examples of what happens throughout. The ingenious device of a “window” on each spread shows what else is occurring simultaneously, gently suggesting to children that the world does not, in fact, revolve around them. My Busy Day contrasts a child’s typical day with the events of a larger world: going to school (one student is at the doctor’s office), eating rice at lunch (in a faraway land, people grow that rice), and so on. Meanwhile, Raga’s pleasingly two-dimensional illustrations use labels to point out familiar objects in each scenario. A surprisingly effective tackling of a hard-to-grasp concept. Preschool-Grade 1. --Daniel Kraus