I felt that the pediatrics shelf was probably the easiest of the shelf exams. (I don't know about the curve yet, however!). I thought the exam was extremely focused unlike the other shelf exams which tend to draw material from many different clerkships. I didn't believe people when they said all you need for this exam is pretest + Blueprints, so I also read First AID and the Harriet Lane handbook. What a waste. Blueprints + Pretest is all you need for this exam even if you are a serious gunner. I'm thinking about derm, and if I could do it all over again, I would only use Blueprints + Pretest.
Most of the questions are diagnosis, and the cases are much more classic than in other shelfs. I was really surprised at the number of classic buzz words used: obese with limp, cold agglutinins, cheeks that looked like they had been slapped, etc. Another question that was quite common (>15 questions) on the exam was mechanism of disease. They would give you a ridiculously obvious clinical scenario and ask you to describe the mechanism. Another important thing that I noticed is that unlike most 3rd year shelfs, there were very few next step in management questions on my exam.
Bottom Line: Blueprints + Pretest. I'm not guaranteeing that you will answer every question, but the vast majority are in these 2 books.
Topics: quite a few diabetes insipidus and SIADH questions, lots of GI, a few trauma cases, diabetes, congenital heart disease (duh!), 1 developmental milestone question (First AID actually has a pretty nice chart for these with really good mnemonics--this is the only thing I would use that book for!),
vaccinations...
Got my score back: 97.
Good Luck...