Book Talk: The Danger Zone Books

This week I'm going to be focusing on books, series and authors that are HUGE in my classroom.

One of the things I've done this year is improved the number and range of informational texts in the classroom. A lot of my students are right into history, and one series has been incredibly popular with students exploring different eras and times.

The Danger Zone books are colourful books, filled with lots of comic-style pictures. They're quite busy, your eye is drawn from one part of the page to the other, but each book has a similar format, so they're easy to follow. Like the Horrible Histories, they tend to focus on the blood and guts aspects of life in history, but unlike the horrible histories, the text that connects things is a little easier to read, and therefore more likely to actually be read.

And with names like Avoid Being in a Medieval Castle, and Avoid Sailing on the Titanic, you've immediately captured attention.

One thing that I really, really liked was the broad scope of the books. Although I still have a tonne to collect, you can get books that range from ancient history to European history, to American history and even some Australian history (Yay!) It's really good for opening up the world a little for the students and feeds nicely into other history books and historical fiction.