Sportopedia
Adam Skinner, illustrated by Mark Long
Wide Eyed Editions

If you want to find out about the enormous variety of sports people participate in, then look no further than Sportopedia, a compendium wherein there must surely be something for everybody. In all some sixty different sports are included some familiar such as football (the world’s most popular sport), cricket, tennis, sprinting and swimming, to those less well known such as kabbadi, a team combat sport that requires no special equipment. It originated in India where I’ve seen it played and is now popular throughout South Asia.

The book is divided into nine sections- ball sports, racket sports, athletics, gymnastics, water sports, motor sports, target sports, combat sports, and finally sporting events (the Olympics Games, the Paralympic games and the Winter Olympics. Each sport is engagingly outlined with such things as kit, rules, pitch diagrams and interesting facts about the game/sport in a ‘facts of the matter’ box in the top corner of each right-hand page. The spreads are brightly coloured and visually engaging with plenty of labelled diagrams, sometimes one of the pitch/field or court. Also included are some historical facts – did you know the first Olympic Games took place she 3000 years ago in Greece?

A great book to have in a primary classroom as well as a home collection.