We planned a trip to the beach for Memorial Day weekend. And as with most other things we do with our little man, I wanted to prepare him for things he might encounter while at the beach. Helen Scales’ What a Shell Can Tell was the perfect book for this!

Each full page spread is filled with delightful facts about the various types of shells and the creature that call those shells home. The information was not so overwhelming that my nearly 4 year-old couldn’t grasp it. In fact, the factual information was fairly succinct and allowed for the beautiful illustrations to solidify that knowledge.

We loved discussing all the images and talking about how they represented the information given. For example, one section talks about how you can tell the age of a shell. The illustrations beautifully showed that specific information so that I could point out the very lines the text had mentioned.

My son was eager to go to the beach and kept saying he hoped he would get to see creatures. Unfortunately, the beach we went to didn’t have many shells. We did find a plethora of one specific type and it was fun to talk about how we saw those clams in the book.

I also want to take a minute to talk about the quality of the book itself. The book is large, maybe a foot and a half in height. This makes for a great lap book and allows for the illustrations to be really detailed and easily seen. The paper quality was amazing too! Thick pages and a very sturdy cover. I was really impressed with the quality of the physical book as well as the information and illustrations it portrayed. If you are planning a beach trip or just want to learn more about shells and what they can tell us, then I encourage you to grab a copy of this book!