Overview
This addictive guide to how the earth works uses brainteasers, puzzles, and off the wall experiments to explain everything from how ants walk up walls to why the moon doesn’t fall out of the sky.
- A follow-up to DK’s popular What Makes Me Me? and Go Figure!
- Bold design and question-based structure makes physics exciting and fun
- Broad appeal: Appropriate for both kids who love science and kids who don’t
Synopsis
This addictive guide to how the earth works uses brainteasers, puzzles, and off the wall experiments to explain everything from how ants walk up walls to why the moon doesn t fall out of the sky.
- A follow-up to DK s popular What Makes Me Me? and Go Figure!
- Bold design and question-based structure makes physics exciting and fun
- Broad appeal: Appropriate for both kids who love science and kids who don t
Children's Literature
This engaging and profoundly informative book should be in every school library. Fourth graders will learn a great deal leafing though its pages, and few American high school seniors know all the physics it contains. It would even make a good sourcebook for elementary school teachers. DK books are often fairly criticized for being sound bites or fact sheets. This is a clear exception. It is true that information is broken up into colorful self-contained boxes, but in this case these boxes relate to each other in a sensible way and tell a common and important story. For example, the sixteen engaging pages devoted to light develop the paradox that light has both a particle and a wave nature, explain color, interference (why bubbles are so colorful), wavelength, scattering (why the sky is blue), the speed of light, and relativity. There are experiments and demonstrations that are easy to do at home and in the classroom. The images are wonderful and refreshingly accurate. There is easily enough here to fill a long rainy afternoon for just about anyone.