One day: Around the world in 24 hours by Suma Din

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Ill. by Christina Engel. Bloomsbury, 2013. ISBN 9781408180235.
(Age: 6+) Picture book. Time. World travel. In one day, fifteen different children around the world are shown in their own houses, schools and towns. Each page reflects their variety and their similarities as twenty four hours passes. Starting with a double page map of the world and the faces and places of the fifteen children, the book map is divided into the time zones of the world, allowing some discussion before reading about the children. Using the twentyfour hour clock will also teach the readers a different way of telling the time.
Each double page thereafter contains one large page of illustrations alongside four smaller illustrations. Each of the five illustrates one child in one country and what they are doing. So each is occurring at the same time around the world, but in different times zones. So a child at school in the United Kingdom, playing soccer at 11 will be doing this at the same time as a child in the USA is eating breakfast, but there it is 8 in the morning, while in South Africa children are just going home from school, and India they are having dinner and in China, going to bed. Pages are crowded with images of children doing different things around the world, and can be a springboard for all sorts of discussion about similarities and differences, but above all about time. Two pages at the end give information about time zones, Greenwich Mean Time and Universal Coordinated Time.
Fran Knight

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