EDUCATION is continuing even during the summer holiday time with several secondary schools running literacy and numeracy projects. Our Super Story Search literacy resource is in use in several of these and, as with all schools participating in the project, they have received free books to keep and review. This week's young reviewer is taking part in the summer literacy project at Queen's Park High School in Blackburn.

THE Dorling Kindersley Children's Illustrated Dictionary, compiled by John McIlwain, £14.99

I FOUND this dictionary very interesting and helpful, giving the meaning and spelling of 12,000 words. This is shown not only in text but in the excellent photographs used to illustrate 2,500 of the words described.

For instance, the word "ache" shows a person with his hand over his mouth as if he has toothache.

At the front of the book is a section suggesting lots of games and fun activities you can do, using the dictionary to improve your word power.

These can be quizzes to find the odd one out, rhyming word games or how to be a word detective. In fact, I think that a good addition to the book would be to include a set of flash cards so that children and adults together could play even more word games to improve reading.

This is an ideal book for families with younger children because it is bright, colourful and easy to read by young people themselves and adults can use it to explain things to children.

Queen's Park High School will be putting the book in their brand new Community Learning and Resource Centre, due to be opened in the autumn term, so that pupils and families will be able to make use of it.

ANTHONY MURTAGH, 11

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.