Sports Illustrated Kids Rookie Books

For all of the mini-athletes out there (or children of sports-loving parents), we’ve got some new non-fiction books that are part of the Sports Illustrated Kids Rookie Books series by Mark Weakland. And, I must say, they’re pretty fun. The first one, Football ABC, goes through all of the letters of the alphabet using football terms. Not only does each letter represent a football word—action, ball, coin toss, and so on—but with each word comes a description that is really helpful in learning about the sport and building vocabulary. For instance, the F page says: “F is for fumble. Uh-oh! When a player drops the ball, it’s a fumble.”

Hockey Counting is set up similarly. In this one, it follows the numbers 1 through 12 and provides hockey lessons and photograph descriptions on each page. For number 6, it says: “Each hockey team is allowed six players on the ice at a time. Five skaters and one goalie wait patiently for the game to begin.”

And if all that wasn’t enough to sell you on these books, there’s more; they both include a glossary, an index, a list of other suggested titles about football and hockey, and information about a website that has links to other sites (researched by the SI staff) related to the books. Not too shabby, eh? And apparently if you spend too much time with that hockey book, you start speaking like a Canadian… J