Fifo is a bear who loves to explore!  He is going to travel to each of the 50 states and help you learn a little bit about each one.  

Fifo Fifty States is a book of poems that goes alphabetically through the states.  Each poem tells you about the states capital and official flower, tree and bird.  The pictures and fun and vibrant and filled with everything the poem talked about as well as some additional landmarks and customs for each state.  The illustrations also have a small map pointing out the location of the state capital.  

This is not a book to try to read all at once since the poems are fairly repetitive, but rather to take state by state as you explore.  This is a great learning tool for 6-10 year olds as they begin to learn about the United States.  I would read one or two poems at a time as a jumping point to begin discovering what each state has to offer.  

My one complaint was in the illustration for my home state, New York.  In the poem, the state capitol is correctly named as Albany; however, on the map it shows that the capital is in New York City.  Albany is nowhere near New York City, and it is always a misconception that New York's capital is New York City, this illustration does not help.  Anyway, I browsed the rest of the capital pictures and they seemed correct. 

This book was received for free in return for an honest review. 

Two Truths and A Lie: It's Alive! presents nine chapters of three stories each about plants, animals and humans where each story seems a little crazy but only one is a lie!  Each story is backed up with sources and pictures and might even be sprinkled with some truths making some stories very difficult to see through.  

This was a very fun book to read with middle school aged children.  After learning about certain topics, we would read the three stories in a corresponding chapter and have a great discussion in trying to decipher which story was the lie.  Our favorite group of stories was the very first one which contained stories of a human-shaped root, an entire forest made up of only one tree and plant communication.  The only thing that I would have prefered is if the answers were directly after each section instead of all together at the end of the book, since this made it easy to see the false story for the next section. These stories were a fun way to engage kids and have them do some critical thinking, can't wait for the next one!

This book was received for free in return for an honest review.