Olly the little white van books

I find that most of the children's books I review here on Being Mrs C are aimed at Little Miss C's age, so it was particularly nice recently to get a book review package that appealed to both kids.

Olly the little white van is the star of a children's TV show where we follow Olly's adventures with his driver Stan and his other vehicle friends in Bumpton. Olly is voiced by children's TV super star Justin Fletcher (does that man ever have time to sleep???) and he's incredibly energetic – much like Justin himself. Now, we don't actually have the right channels at home to watch Olly, so my two were coming at these books "cold" somewhat so it was interesting to see what they made of them.

Starting with Master C – he was looking at the four chunky board books – Olly the little white van , Bazza the Orange Van , Jethro the tractor Chunky and Royston the Fire Engine Chunky . These books are a great size for little hands and feel like they're actually made of plastic – meaning that Master C was really easily able to get hold of the pages and turn them himself. My only problem with these books is that they didn't actually have the titles of the books on the front cover – they're written on the rear instead. Now I actually found this really frustrating when we sat down to read them together – especially as I couldn't always remember the names of them all. Very strange.

Master C seemed to like the stories, but with the pages being so easy for him to grab hold of and turn he sometimes just ended up more interested in turning the pages – so I soon got used to speed reading the stories to him!

Little Miss C really enjoyed the two books aimed at her age range – The Chauffeur and The Bumpton Rally . Both are pitched just right for the 3+ age range in terms of the story and she also liked the illustrations which I think are taken directly from the TV series.

In addition to the story books there are also two activity books in the Olly series – Sticker & Colouring Fun and Press-out Sticker & Activity Fun . The former of these is quite a simple book with some large pictures of the main characters for the children to colour in, and some stickers in the middle that they can use to decorate their pictures further. If I had to be critical it did seem that the pictures were all very similar and quite plain, but this didn't seem to bother LMC. Also, the stickers were also very small in size – making some of them difficult for little hands to peel off the backing paper. 

The Press Out Sticker and Activity Fun book is somewhat more involved featuring odd one out, counting and spot the difference activities. There are stickers to complete some of the pictures and activities and some pages to colour in too. At the centre is a press out board game where the vehicles have to travel to the finish line to win the race. 

I see the two activity books as very much being targeted at two different age ranges and were Master C just a few months older I think he may have enjoyed the colouring and sticker book. Little Miss C has certainly been making the most of the more advanced one.

These eight books really are perfect for Olly the little white van fans of any age.

Disclaimer: We were sent a set of Olly the little white van books for the purposes of this review. This post contains affiliate links.