As Charlotte begins geography lessons at school, her fabulous curiosity and thirst for knowledge extends towards learning about our world and different cultures, and what children in other countries get up to in their daily lives.

In "My Madagascar" we join the effervescent and energetic Balbini to learn all about her country, Madagascar - a large island off the coast of Africa, with its own unique animal species and hugely diverse climate and terrain.

Balbini takes us on a whistle-stop tour of her beautiful country and introduces us to the sights, sounds, food and customs there.

Lush tropical rainforests and sumptuous sandy beaches made us truly want to dive onto a plane and visit this awesome place. Balbini's enthusiasm comes across in the book's informative and descriptive text, exquisitely detailed and attractively presented with fantastic colour photos and illustrations throughout.

A fantastic way to show children that Madagascar isn't just an animated movie, it's a truly beautiful and astonishing place too!

Join Balbini and find out more about this fascinating country

Charlotte's best bit: Learning all about lovely Madagascar food and yummy vanilla, which grows on the island

Daddy's Favourite bit: A superbly presented book, really made us want to visit!

(Kindly sent to us for review by Austin and Macauley Publishing)

Here at ReadItDaddy, we have seen a lot of alphabet books and often they follow a fairly rigid format. The most common seem to be alphabet books based around animals (though it's always fun to see what people are going to do with X!) but Sue Pavey's "Alphabet Friends" is designed to be a series that introduces a diverse gang of characters that each represent a letter, and have fun exploring their wordy world.

We're taking a look at "The Alphabet Friends and their Animals". Having gone through the book (in PDF form) myself, and then taking Charlotte through it, I could pretty much guess straight away she was going to fall completely in love with Daisy (the Letter 'D' girl, naturally) and her frog.

Charlotte's busily working her way through sounding out and phonics work at school and at home, so Sue's book was great for her. She enjoyed reading out the nice bold clear text (and of course giggled at some of the funnier animal antics!) and the illustrations are nice, plain, simple and unfussy - absolutely perfect for children who are just beginning to recognise letters and words.

Read out loud, the book gives me the opportunity to put on as many daft voices as I can muster (do you do this with your children when you read aloud to them? If not, why not!)

All in all a rather pleasing and satisfying little alphabet book. You can grab "The Alphabet Friends and their Animals" from the following links:

Amazon

Waterstones

WH Smith

Charlotte's best bit: Kiki has a little ant :)

Daddy's favourite bit: Harry's gerbil is very fat!