June 7, 2026
Progress Books for Kids
What Do People Do All Day?, The Story of Inventions, and more
Four books this week about progress, how things get made, and the people who made them.
Richard Scarry’s What Do People Do All Day? shows kids how a whole town runs, from the farmer growing the wheat to the baker selling the bread. The Story of Inventions walks through the real successes and failures behind dozens of inventions, with cutaway diagrams of how each one works. Working Boats pulls ten vessels apart in cross-section, from a Coast Guard rescue boat to a crab boat, down to the engines and the jobs aboard. And The Brilliant Deep follows Ken Nedimyer, the diver who figured out how to regrow dead coral reefs from clippings.
Books
What Do People Do All Day?
The classic tour of Busytown, where every character has a job that keeps the town running. (Richard Scarry)
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Books
The Story of Inventions
Real stories behind dozens of inventions, from the wheel to modern gadgets. (Anna Claybourne and Adam Larkum)
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Books
Working Boats: An Inside Look at Ten Amazing Watercraft
Cross-section cutaways of ten working boats and the jobs people do aboard each. (Tom Crestodina)
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Books
The Brilliant Deep: Rebuilding the World's Coral Reefs
True story of one man rebuilding the world's coral reefs, one fragment at a time. (Kate Messner, Matthew Forsythe)
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This week's picks
One product and one brand from the collection
The Way Things Work. A hand-illustrated guide to the inventions, discoveries, and social systems that pushed our humanity forward. Get it here
Hungry Minds. Hungry Minds makes hand-illustrated reference books that gather the inventions, ideas, and systems behind how the world works, built to be kept and passed on. Find it here
Last week's drop
In case you missed it
Something New Every Month. Little Passports' World Adventures, Mark Rober's Build Box, and more View the drop
National Geographic
National Geographic Kids
A year of the magazine plus six books, photography-led and entirely on paper.
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KiwiCo
Doodle Crate
One real art technique a month — block printing, marbling, bookbinding.
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CrunchLabs
Build Box
A working engineering toy to build each month, designed by Mark Rober.
Get it here →
Little Passports
World Adventures Subscription Box
A new country every month — map, passport, and a project to build.
Get it here →