Book Description

Independent Contains 10 "just right" books for beginning readers who are ready to read on their own. 10 high interest science topics, from "space" to "bones" 40 colorful stickers Hands-on science activities Reading comprehension questions ... Read more

Reviews (1)

Simply Fun
Nora Gaydos produces great tools for making learning fun and enticing. She's done it again with these child-sized science books (about 5"x5").

The ten paperback books come in a slipcover (not the CD storage-like book that her "Now I'm Reading" series comes in) and offer the following topics (quoted from the parent's guide):
Blast Off!: Covers the heavenly bodies that make up space, including the Sun, Moon, planets, and stars; Bones: Discusses your skeleton and why bones are important to you; Lots of Rocks: Talks about the variety of rocks around us and how we use them; All Wet: Tells how water comes in different forms and discusses water conservation; Week of Wild Weather: Covers the different types of weather conditions; Our Planet: Discusses the topography of our planet Earth; The Changing Caterpillar: Shows the life cycle of a butterfly; Watch It Grow: Shows parts of a plant and how plants grow; and What Are You? Covers the basic classification of animals. There is also a Parent Guide which gives an overview of the materials and discusses how to use the books, and includes 40 reading incentive stickers.

At the back of each book there is a science experiment to do together with your child to illustrate the lesson. Instructions are very easy & they utilize items commonly found in most households. There are also small sections at the back which highlight some basic facts of the lesson, and some questions which focus on reading comprehension.

The books were written as independent readers, but are completely appropriate for curious toddlers who like to be read to as well. The recommended ages printed on the box says 4-7. I like the books because they are short (11 pages of story) yet they convey concepts in an interesting and not too simplistic way (a tough feat for 11 pages with 1-3 short sentences per page). These are great tools for home and school. My 3.5 year old thinks they are great fun and asks to do the experiments again & again. The books definitely provide entertaining learning and are well worth the price. They can also be a great way of spending quality time together with your child. ... Read more

Book Description

Have you ever eaten part of a flower? You have if you have eaten an apple! Find out how an apple grows from bud to flower to fruit--ready for you to pick!

Have you ever eaten a part of a flower? You have if you have eaten an apple! Find out how an apple grows from bud to flower to fruit--ready for you to pick! ... Read more

Reviews (1)

How do Apples Grow?
Betsy Maestro has done it again! Her book about how apples grow is both informative and fun to read. Students will be captivated by the story and the pictures. This book is a must have for all classrooms! ... Read more

Book Description

The e.encyclopedia science pulls out all the stops to tell-and show-readers everything about science. Packed with the very latest photographs, illustrations, and 3-D models, and enhanced by cutting-edge computer image manipulation, e.encyclopedia science is a comprehensive and authoritative reference work for children.

That's not all it is, though. The e.encyclopedia program takes the next step in modern reference publishing by partnering with Google, the Web's most trafficked search engine, to actively manage and update dedicated Web sites to take you directly to the most useful, safe, and age-appropriate information online. DK and Google-a match made in info-gathering heaven-set the benchmark for science and technology reference for the whole family. ... Read more

Reviews (1)

From Cow to Ice Cream
Nice photos with short explanations for young children learning about how ice cream is made.This book works nicely in conjunction with the book Let's Find Out About Ice Cream. ... Read more

Amazon.com

The thorniest scientific problem of the eighteenth century was how to determine longitude.Many thousands of lives had been lost at sea over the centuries due to the inability to determine an east-west position. This is the engrossing story of the clockmaker, John "Longitude" Harrison, who solved the problem that Newton and Galileo had failed to conquer, yet claimed only half the promised rich reward. ... Read more

Reviews (209)

Amazing subject, fascinating story
With "Longitude" Dava Sobel has written a very interesting book about the greatest scientific problem of the 18th century.

As a result of the 1707-shipwreck story (with a loss of 4 out of the 5 ships), the English Parliament offered in 1714 a 20.000 pounds reward to the person that could provide a practicable and useful way of determining longitude. (If you have forgot, longitude is the "lines" that runs from pole to pole). Not being able to determining longitude was a great problem. Ships spent excessive time trying to find its way back to port, or worse men, ship and cargo were lost at sea.

John Harrison (1693-1776) spent his lifetime trying to solve the longitude mystery. Harrison was a son of a countryman, with minimal schooling, and was self-educated in watch making. He made several timepieces, which all qualified for the reward, but the reward was delayed several times by the Longitude committee whom believed that other ways of measuring longitude were the preferred ones. Ultimately after a lot of harassment and trouble, Harrison was given the reward money.

Dava Sobel has done a wonderful job in this book, capturing Harrison's fascinating character, his brilliance, preserving and hard working nature. The author has also managed to strike a perfect balance between technical jargon and personal anecdotes, and she does it in such a way permitting the lay readers of the book to admire the elegance of Harrison's discoveries. I believe it is a sign of excellent quality when an author makes learning so interesting.

I was hooked from the first page of this book and I read it in 50-page gulps at a time.

Highly recommended!

John Harrison--an extraordinary person
John Harrison (1693-1776) spent his lifetime inventing and perfecting a series of timepieces to measure longitude. As Dava Sobel relates in her engaging narrative, "Longitude," until the 18th century sailors navigated by following parallels of latitude and roughly estimating distance traveled east or west. Ships routinely missed their destinations, often taking excessive time to arrive or succumbing to reefs off fogbound shores. Thousands of sailors and tons of cargo were lost.

In 1714, England's Parliament offered £20,000 (the equivalent of about $12 million today) to anyone who provided a "practicable and useful" means of determining longitude. Countless solutions were suggested, some bizarre, some impractical, some workable only on land and others far too complex.

Most astronomers believed the answer lay in the sky, but Harrison, a clockmaker, imagined a mechanical solution--a clock that would keep precise time at sea. By knowing the exact times at the Greenwich meridian and at a ship's position, one could find longitude by calculating the time difference. However, most scientists, including Isaac Newton, discounted a clock because there were too many variables at sea. Changes in temperature, air pressure, humidity and gravity would surely render a watch inaccurate.

Harrison persisted. As Dava Sobel writes, he worked on his timepiece for decades, though he suffered skepticism and ridicule. Even after completing his timepiece, an instrument we now call a chronometer, in 1759, he underwent a long series of unfair trials and demonstrations. Ultimately he triumphed.

Sobel, a science writer who contributes to Audubon, Life, Omni and other magazines, captures John Harrison's extraordinary character: brilliant, persevering and heroic in the face of adversity. He is a man you won't forget.

Brief but enjoyable
This slim volume tells the story of John Harrison who, although untrained, built four revolutionary clocks that changed how ships navigate at sea. It also tells about the political fight Harrison was forced to fight to win recognition for his work.

Written in a easy-to-read, "magazine" tone the tale goes quickly, whole years pass in a couple sentences. I wanted more details and this is where the book disappoints but it may not be the authors fault The book hints that many events weren't recorded and more details just aren't available.

One technical note: I think the font used in this tiny, five by eight inch book is a little small and the page numbers, even smaller, aren't readable at a glance. Or maybe I'm getting old.

Great story, but BEWARE of inaccuracies in this book.
John Harrison completes his first pendulum clock in 1713 before the age of 20. He made the gears for this out of wood which was radical for such a use, but as a carpenter, perhaps not to him---which is a mark of genius, I'd say; to reach beyond accepted norms in this manner. This he did after borrowing a book on math and the laws of motion; which he copied word for word, making his own copy. He incorporated different varieties of wood into his clock for strenth and later invented a bi-metal pendulum to counteract the expansion and compression of various individual metals. He also employed friction-free movements so as to do away with problematic lubricants. When intrigued by the puzzle of time at sea and the issue of longitude he contemplated substituting something not prone to gravity, as a pendulum of course is, to track times passing. In 1737 he creates a cantilevered clock 4 foot square. This the longitude board (which had offered a cash bonus to anyone who could devise a method in which time at sea could be kept) admired. Four years later he returns with an improved model; then starts on a 3rd model, like the previous two, also a fairly large sized clock.But there exists a problem within this book: An artisan freemason by the name of John Jefferys at the Worshipful Company of clockmakers befriends Harrison and then later presents to him a pocket watch in 1753. Then in 1755, while still working on his 3rd model, Harrison says this to the Longitude board: I have..."good reason to think" on the basis of a watch "already executed that such small machines[he's referring to pocketwatches] may be of great service with respect to longitude." He then completes version 3 in 1759. His fourth version appears just a year later, however, and is a 5 inch wide pocketwatch! The obvious inference made by the author is that after he received the pocketwatch from Jeffreys he seemingly put his version #3 on the backburner and soon started on the pocketwatch 4th version. The author does not claim Harrison copied anything from the Jeffreys model, but she certainly phrases this section so as to lend one to believe that this may have been the case; that Jefferys had a hand in the masterstroke invention Harrison eventually produced in version #4. This is not true. Harrison commissioned the watch he received from Jeffreys and was based on Harrison's specifications. It seems that Harrison simply asked Jeffreys to test an idea which he himself hadn't the time to attack just then; as he was still working on his 3rd version of a table-top prototype clock. Hence Harrison's above statement to the board in 1755 whence his ideas were validated by Jeffreys. In addition, the author plays up the part of the Astronomer Royal's part in attempting to impede Harrison from convincing the longitiude board of the efficacy of a time-piece solution to this problem over a celestial answer to this conundrum. The author also jazzes up the issue of whether Harrison received the prize the board promised to pay for a successful solution herein; even though the board supported him for upwards of 20 years as he pursued this quest. It's as if the author intentionally omitted some facts (that the Jefferys was a Harrison commission), and pumped up others (of a rival/foil on the board trying to impede Harrison and the compensation issue; implying that Harrison was jipped) just to make the story more compelling. John Harrison's story, however, is extremely compelling as it is and didn't need this extra spice served up by the author.Do read this (very short) book on how this Mr. Harrison solved the problem of knowing where one is when at sea; and if you're in London, visit the Old Royal Observatory and the Clockmakers museum (in the Guildhall) where you can see Harrison's wonderful creations in person. Enjoy!

The Man who Captured Time so Ships could Navigate Accurately
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Note: This review has been written from a city with the following position on Earth:

LATITUDE: (43 degrees 2 minutes North)
LONGITUDE: (81 degrees 9 minutes West).

In order to understand the significance of this remarkable book by Dava Sobel, the reader has to understand some words and phrases in the book's title and subtitle.

"Longitude" along with Latitude are two numbers along with compass directions that are used to fix the position of anything on the planet Earth (as in the note above). Lines of Latitude are the imaginary, parallel, horizontal lines circling the Earth with the equator (fixed by nature) being the "zero-degree parallel of latitude." Lines of Longitude or "meridians" are the imaginary lines that run top to bottom (north and south), from the Earth's North Pole to its South Pole with the "prime meridian" (established by political means) being the "zero-degree meridian of longitude." (Since the mid-1880s, the prime merdian has passed through Greenwich, England. Before this time, the imaginary line that passed through a ship's home port was usually used as the zero-degree meridian.)

Finding the latitude on land or at sea was easy and eventually a device was invented to make it even easier. But finding longitude, especially at sea on a swaying ship was difficult, a difficulty "that stumped the wisest minds of the world for the better part of human history" and was "the greatest scientific problem" of the 1700s. Ways of determining longitude astronomically were devised, but these proved to be impractical when used at sea.

England's parliament recognized that "the longitude problem" had to be solved practically since many people and valuable cargo were lost at sea when the ship's navigators lost sight of land. Thus, this parliament offered a top monetary prize that's equivalent to many millions of dollars today to anybody who could solve the problem.

Enter "a lone genius" named John Harrison (1693 to 1776). While most thought the solution to the problem was astronomical, Harrison saw time as the solution.

To calculate the longitude using time on a ship at sea, you have to realize these two facts found in this book:

(i) The Earth takes 24 hours of time to spin 360 degrees on its axis from east to west.
(ii) Noon (12:00 PM) is the highest point the sun seems to "travel" in a day.

To learn one's longitude at sea using time, as this book explains, it's necessary to do the following:

(1) Know the time it is aboard ship (local noon was normally used because of fact (ii) above).
(2) At the very same moment, know the time at a known longitude (such as at Greenwich, England).
(3) The difference in time between (1) and (2) is coverted to a longitude reading in degrees and direction (using fact (i) above).

Harrison's solution was the accurate determination of time of (2) above by inventing a reliable timepiece. This timepiece, in this case, would be set to Greenwich time. (Note that, as stated, (1) could be determined using the noon-day sun but this was not always practical. Eventually another timepiece was used to determine the ship's local noon for a particular day.) It has to be realized that this was the "era of pendulum clocks" where, on a deck of a rocking ship, "such clocks would slow down or speed up, or stop running altogether." Harrison was to capture time by building a marine clock or "timekeeper" (eventually called a "chronometer") that could be used on a ship at sea.

This book tells the "true story" of Harrison and his chronometers. (There were five built over a forty-year period. Harrison's first timekeeping device was known as H-1, his second was H-2, and so on.) Sobel uses accuracy (as evidenced by her thirty references), extensive interviews, and an engaging, mostly non-technical narrative (only essential technical detail is included) to convey a story that's filled with suspense, heroism, perfectionism, and villiany. All this in less than 200 pages!!

The only problem I had with this book is that it has hardly any pictures (photographs and illustrations). I would have liked to have seen pictures of the various people involved in this saga, maps showing where ships traveled, more photos of Harrison's amazing timepieces (both interior and exterior), and diagrams that explained important concepts. A diagram that actually showed how longitude, using a simple example, is calculated (using the steps above) would also have been helpful.

Finally, there is a good 1999 movie entitled "Longitude" based on this book. Be aware that even though this book is short, the movie is long (over three hours).

In conclusion, this book documents the exciting "true story" of how "a lone genius" solved "the longitude problem." Sobel states this more eloquently: "With his marine clocks, John Harrison tested the waters of space-time. He succeeded, against all odds, in using the fourth...dimension to link points on a three-dimensional globe. He [took] the world's whereabouts from the stars, and locked [or captured] the secret in a...watch."

<=====> ... Read more

Book Description

"[In] a revision of the 1963 edition, [a] brief, clearly written text [tells of a young girl who] learns some interesting facts about fireflies from her grandfather.Alexander uses richly hued pastels for her illustrations of the young girl, her grandparents' farm, and the creatures of a summer night."—SLJ.

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Reviews (1)

Fireflies in the Night
This book is about a young girl who visits who grandparents during the summer.Her grandparents live on a farm and know a lot about fireflies including how to catch and how to handle them.The young girl learns some interesting facts about the fireflies and how people in other countries use the light that fireflies provide.The grandfather explains how fireflies make their light; as well as the different light signals that males and females produce.This book can make readers eager to finish the page they are on, so that they can turn to the next page and learn another fascinating fact.It is a splendid introduction to fireflies! ... Read more

Book Description

Children/Science

Become a super science sleuth with . . .

Detective Science

40 Crime-Solving, Case-Breaking, Crook-Catching Activities for Kids

Search for evidence, gather clues, and discover how science can help solve a mystery. From dusting for fingerprints to analyzing handwriting, these easy, fun-filled activities give you a firsthand look at how detectives and forensic scientists use science to solve real-life crimes.

Make a plaster cast of a shoe. Identify lip prints left on a glass. Examine hair and clothing fibers. Practice chemistry to identify mystery substances, and much more.

In no time at all, you'll be thinking like a detective and performing experiments like a real forensic scientist! ... Read more

Reviews (1)

Not bad, but contains some errors
Not bad, but contains some errors. For example on page 29 thedescription of Radial and Ulnar loops is incorrect. You can'tdifferentiate between the two types unless you know which hand theycome from. ... Read more

Reviews (1)

Science Interactions Course 2
This textbook is great. It has many different topics and review pages to, of course, review the chapter. This i the science textbook my school uses and I just love it. ... Read more

Book Description

Weather

Will it be warm or cold? Should we wear shorts or pants? Shoes or boots? Read and find out why the weather is so difficult to predict.

Reviews (1)

This book makes learning about weather easier for children!
This is an excellent book for children learning about weather. It provides a great look at many aspects of weather that children can understand and enjoy. This book is a great supplemental tool to use in the classroom. The information and wonderful illustrations enable children to receive a clear understanding of the many aspects of weather. ... Read more

Book Description

Follow the Ring of Fire from New Zealand to South America. Navigate the Blue Nile and walk the Great Wall of China. Meet the first person to reach the South Pole and witness the "Green Revolution" in India. Explore the people, landscapes, and languages of our fascinating planet and uncover the answers to all your questions about world geography . . .

How old is the earth?See page 8.

Can volcanoes form underwater?See page 14.

What are maquiladoras?See page 50.

Why are rain forests so important?See page 63.

Where and what are the Pillars of Hercules? See page 77.

Is the Red Sea really red?See page 88.

What languages are spoken in Africa?See page 112.

Do any plants or animals live in Antarctica?See page 133. ... Read more

Book Description

An invaluable family reference book, information is thematically organized into four key sections and packed with facts, figures, and quotable statistics. You will find an amazing breadth of scientific information, including chemistry, physics, weather, space, and the living world. With over 1,000 full-color photographs, diagrams, charts, cutaway drawings, and detailed illustrations, DK's The Visual Encyclopedia of Science shows you what others only tell you. ... Read more

Reviews (3)

Excellent for all age
I wish I had this book when I was student. I am glad I found this one for my curious son. Visuals are excellent with great explainations.

Excellent
This is an excellent book. I wish I had this book when I was student. You MUST have this if you care about learning yourself or want to teach your kids (that's why I bought it) about science.

Compact and very useful!
The other day I was watching a show about the ocean and saw the most amazing thing. They were talking about "black smokers - strange chimneys that form on the ocean floor." Later, in a discussion with a friend, I needed some extra information and this book provided me with the specifics.

When it comes to looking up this type of information, search engines are useful to a point. However, I find having a book gives me more confidence that the information is really accurate and true. Although, I do have a real problem with evolution in these types of books. Apart from that, the information is wonderful.

There are very colorful pictures. The Maple leaves turning from green to orange is shown with an explanation as to why this occurs. There are so many pictures in this book and the type is very easy to see.

If you have children and they need a book to look up facts for their school projects, this is a nice, compact size children will feel comfortable using.

The only question you will have when this book arrives is: "What do I look up first?"

Highly Recommended ... Read more