The Acadia Files: Book One, Summer Science

and

The Acadia Files: Book Two, Autumn Science

The science is excellent, the topics covered are creatively chosen and presented, and the illustrations are engaging. These are for kids around 9-12 years of age, but would serve a wider range.

Topics include: “Why Leaves Change Color,” “Drinking Dinosaur Pee”, “Where Sand Comes From”, and “Tides and Gravity.”

Aside from the science lessons, there are life lessons, as Acadia learns to not troll people, and embrace things in the real world that are not ideal, such as the fact that the sun wakes you up in the morning or that things fall apart. I’m giving one or both of these to some kids this year.

I don’t think these books have won any awards yet, but they will.

The book I want to tell you about now, Life on Earth: Dinosaurs: With 100 Questions and 70 Lift-flaps! by Heather Alexander and Andres Lozano, is very wordy. For example, it might say “how did a dinosaur become a fossil? on the flap, and underneath it give the three stages of diagenesis. Oddly, the book is listed on Amazon as being for preschool to first graders, but the material is way advanced beyond that. I’d put this book at 2nd-3rd grade. But it is a flip book.

As noted in the title, there are 100 different questions, all with answers, with 70 of them being written on flaps.

I learned something interesting. I had not known about Therizinosaurus with its very long claws, thought to be used for digging. But I was very disappointed to find out that the teeth on this critter were clearly not adapted to eating roots. Oh well. (The latter was not in the book, something I had to research elsewhere.)

The answer to the question, “Why did the dinosaurs die out” is found under three separate flaps, each with a different hypothesis. That is in fact the current “consensus” as I understand it. Some will object to the book not insisting that dinosaurs never went extinct because there are birds. But they did, of course, go extinct. Just like the synapsids went extinct. Or did they?

Anyway, Life on Earth: Dinosaurs: With 100 Questions and 70 Lift-flaps! is a fun book, good for kids in first, second, or third grade.

In the same series: Life on Earth: Human Body, Life on Earth: Farm: With 100 Questions and 70 Lift-flaps!, and Life on Earth: Jungle: With 100 Questions and 70 Lift-flaps!. I only briefly looked through the “Jungle” book (as it were) and, as do most kids books on jungles (aka “rain forests”) it conflates the forest, savanna, and all the animals on all the continents. Hard to get away from that.