Here's a fine example of how inconsistent a publisher's series can be. All these titles deal with the familiar observable world about us. Machines, Materials, Textures and Tools do so in a really useful way, showing us familiar objects and by gentle guidance reminding us what we already know about them and telling us more in an encouragingly assembled scrapbook format that will reward sharing. We get hairdriers, concrete-mixers, plastic wellies, woolly hats, knobbly ginger root, spiky cactus, and all kinds of hand-tools, from pencil sharpener to hammer, all making a helpful discussible contribution to early learning.

The books on colour, though, are a severe disappointment, being mere collections of same-hued objects - scrapbooks without the encouragement, logic or practicality of the other four. Not all blues are the same - as Swanstone, McCarron and Morgan memorably established* - but you wouldn't know that from the text here, and if the series should ever extend to Brown, so overwhelming is the monochromy of each volume that it would have to be called 'Death by chocolate'. And a statement like 'Red is the colour of our lips' is not just insensitive, it's plain unobservant.

So this is a curate's egg of a series which underlines the need to distinguish grain from chaff and pigs from pokes.

(*in 'Blues my naughty sweetie gives to me')