A basic study of the human body for an uncertain audience.
A lift-the-flap book explores the human body.
Enclosed in a regular binding rather than the usual cardboard covers of a toddler’s novelty book and featuring 70 lifting flaps, bright colors, cartoonlike illustrations, and a Q-and-A format, this effort offers accurate but very simple information on anatomy and physiology. A typical flap asks, “What pumps blood around my body?” The answer is under the flap: “Your heart. Your heart pumps the blood that moves around your body.” Other questions are posed in small sidebars with the answers immediately following, sans flaps. Sometimes answers are so brief as to be pointless, while others are confusing. “What does this pair of bean-shaped organs do?” is answered with, “These are your two kidneys….” Another text box is only slightly more enlightening: “Your pee—or urine—travels from your kidneys into your bladder.” A confusing cross section of the heart is filled with arrows pointing in various directions—supposedly showing the flow of blood—and includes a numbered series of steps with no corresponding numbers on the seemingly two-chambered heart (the unlabeled valves between atria and ventricles being depicted as comma-shaped lines). There is no backmatter. The reading level might match well with the middle grades, the level of complexity with early elementary, and the format with even younger children. Companion title Farm publishes simultaneously.
A basic study of the human body for an uncertain audience. (Nonfiction. 5-8)Pub Date: April 15, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-84780-906-3
Page Count: 16
Publisher: Wide Eyed Editions
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
Enticing and eco-friendly.
Why and how to make a rain garden.
Having watched through their classroom window as a “rooftop-rushing, gutter-gushing” downpour sloppily flooded their streets and playground, several racially diverse young children follow their tan-skinned teacher outside to lay out a shallow drainage ditch beneath their school’s downspout, which leads to a patch of ground, where they plant flowers (“native ones with tough, thick roots,” Schaub specifies) to absorb the “mucky runoff” and, in time, draw butterflies and other wildlife. The author follows up her lilting rhyme with more detailed explanations of a rain garden’s function and construction, including a chart to help determine how deep to make the rain garden and a properly cautionary note about locating a site’s buried utility lines before starting to dig; she concludes with a set of leads to online information sources. Gómez goes more for visual appeal than realism. In her scenes, a group of smiling, round-headed, very small children in rain gear industriously lay large stones along a winding border with little apparent effort; nevertheless, her images of the little ones planting generic flowers that are tall and lush just a page turn later do make the outdoorsy project look like fun.
Enticing and eco-friendly. (Picture book. 5-7)Pub Date: March 12, 2024
ISBN: 9781324052357
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Norton Young Readers
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A gleeful game for budding naturalists.
Artfully cropped animal portraits challenge viewers to guess which end they’re seeing.
In what will be a crowd-pleasing and inevitably raucous guessing game, a series of close-up stock photos invite children to call out one of the titular alternatives. A page turn reveals answers and basic facts about each creature backed up by more of the latter in a closing map and table. Some of the posers, like the tail of an okapi or the nose on a proboscis monkey, are easy enough to guess—but the moist nose on a star-nosed mole really does look like an anus, and the false “eyes” on the hind ends of a Cuyaba dwarf frog and a Promethea moth caterpillar will fool many. Better yet, Lavelle saves a kicker for the finale with a glimpse of a small parasitical pearlfish peeking out of a sea cucumber’s rear so that the answer is actually face and butt. “Animal identification can be tricky!” she concludes, noting that many of the features here function as defenses against attack: “In the animal world, sometimes your butt will save your face and your face just might save your butt!” (This book was reviewed digitally.)
A gleeful game for budding naturalists. (author’s note) (Informational picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: July 11, 2023
ISBN: 9781728271170
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Sourcebooks eXplore
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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