Super Science Projects about Weather and Natural Forces

School Library Journal

Gr 4-7-These two books each contain six experiments that explore scientific concepts. The unattractive format has lime-green borders, cramped text, and uninspired photos. The better of the two is Oceans, which contains activities that clarify concepts about the water cycle, water density and pressure, waves, and tides. The final, most original experiment explores the effects of different shorelines on tides using various-shaped baking pans and modeling clay. Paul Fleisher's Our Oceans: Experiments and Activities in Marine Science (Millbrook, 1995) teaches much more about the ocean and also includes experiments. Janice VanCleave's Oceans for Every Kid (Wiley, 1996) has many clearly described experiments packaged in an even less appealing format. In Weather, although the first two activities contain written directions for creating weather instruments with gauges with one-millimeter increments, all of the illustrations depict one-centimeter increments. This makes the instruments appear much easier to create and read than they actually are. Weather experiments abound in many titles already owned by most libraries.-Ellen Heath, Orchard School, Ridgewood, NJ Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|