How Big is BIG?

How BIG is BIG? is a book that explores how size is relative, through the eyes of three friends: Olivia, Oscar and Orin. The three friends set off on a journey around the Earth to discover that size is dependent on how big you are and where you are looking from.

How BIG is BIG? is aimed at 4-14 year old children. The book uses simple language to cover various facts about creatures and places on the Earth and in the Universe in which we live, in a fun and easy to understand way to illustrate how size is relative.

Olivia and Oscar ask a series of questions about how big things are, and Orin answers.

There are callout boxes throughout the book to expand on the answers that Orin gives to Olivia and Oscar. Dimensions are provided for the volcano, whale shark and other things that Olivia and Oscar discover along the way. But the dimensions are not only provided in the conventional metric system, they are also measured by the number of elephants high or long that the thing is.

The reason for using elephants as a means of measurement is to help children gain perspective on the size of things. To say something is 100km is a distance that very few kids either understand or can grasp. The idea is to move what is in their minds abstract (100km) into something concrete (how many elephants long this is). Most children have either seen an elephant in a zoo or realise that an elephant is big and can relate to it's size. So by providing this concrete example from which they can measure things they gain a better understanding of How BIG is BIG?.