Review: Guardian Angel Publishing

The newest items I have been looking over for the TOS Homeschool Crew* are five eBooks from Guardian Angel Publishing (GAP). GAP produces eBooks, print books, books on CD, and they will soon be adding DVD books as well. In reading their "About eBooks" page I was pretty impressed to read their reasoning behind using eBooks. Typically I am not a big fan of eBooks as I like to hold books & I still find it hard at times to read from a computer screen. The formatting with these eBooks, however, works rather well (and I do have a large computer screen which helps some).

Two really neat things I found out about GAP is that they are "green" publishers. This means that they only publish books as they are ordered (yes, you can still get printed books from them). They also are starting to offer their books as in iKids Play Apps which allows them to be viewed on iPhones. This would be something nice to have if you have young children (and an iPhone).

GAP books are written for children ages 0-12. They range in cost from$5 for the eBook download, $9.95 (+$5.95 for shipping) for the CD of the eBook, and $10.95-$11.95 (+$6.95 for shipping) for the print version. DVD Book videos, which will be forthcoming, will be the same price as the eBook CDs.

The books that I was given to look over were:

Stubby's Destiny written by Dixie Philips is the story of the little donkey who is chosen to carry Jesus during Palm Sunday. It's a sweet story about how we all have a destiny for our lives.

Hamster Holidays: Noun and Adjective Adventures by Cynthia Reeg is a really enjoyable and fun book. As the subtitle suggests, it is a book to teach about nouns and adjectives. All the nouns and adjectives in the book are color coded making it easier for children to pick out as the book is read to them or by them. I also enjoyed all the activity pages at the back of the book and plan to use some with my boys. The story tells a short story for every month of the year featuring hamsters.

Another really cute story that we were able to check out is called Maybe We Are Flamingos by Safari Sue Thurman. The story focuses on two baby flamingos who wonder if they really are flamingos when they realize all the older ones are pink and they are white. It's a great way to teach little ones about flamingos and why they are pink (which is pretty neat I think). And, as my oldest son just pointed out, how we change as we grow up.

Earthquake! Hey What's Going On? By Susan J. Berger is a fun science book that discusses what the earth is made up of and how earthquakes occur. I enjoyed the tone of the book which talked directly to the children and made it fun to learn about earthquakes. Another feature I really liked are the "Factoids" scattered throughout the book that tell interesting little facts. There are even some experiments included as well to help bring the lessons home. Even though Maine doesn't get many earthquakes (I do remember at least two very minor ones with a tiny bit of shaking - one when I was a child and the other one about five years ago), it was still fun to read about them. My boys certainly enjoyed it.

The last book we reviewed was titled The Sum of Our Parts: No Bones About It by Bill Kirk. This was a really fun book. Again, it had the little fun factoids throughout. The illustrations added to its appeal - especially for my boys. The book taught about all the bones in the body, why we needed them, and where they were located along with their correct names. This tied in nicely with our science.

My boys really did enjoy these books. As I mentioned earlier, I am not a huge fan of eBooks, but I found these easy to read on our computer. They are not long chapter books so you are not spending hours in front of a screen reading out loud. I read four of these in one sitting though & my boys handled that just fine (they stood behind me so they could see the photos). All in all I found this a very neat resource & one I had not heard of prior to reviewing them for the TOS Homeschool Crew.

Be sure to check out more reviews from other Crew members by clicking HERE. We were not all given the same titles.




*Disclaimer: I was not paid for this review. All opinions shared are my own. TOS Crew Members are given the product free of charge in order to review it.