Although this is a meaty book for its age level and rather lengthy, my children were completely absorbed when I read this aloud to them.

Stories in Stone presents the "World of Animal Fossils" and the story of the dinosaurs from the point of view of generally accepted scientific theories of today. Chapter 1 (A Rock Sandwich) covers introduces the idea of fossils, how they were formed, types of fossils, the scientific classification of animal species ("Why Dinosaur Names are Hard to Spell") and how scientists determine the age of fossils.

Chapter 2 (Buried at Sea) covers the oldest fossils that are believed to have come from ancient oceans (although they are found in very dry places today). This chapter also covers the theory that "about 180 million years ago, Earth had one huge continent ... surrounded by a large ocean".

Chapter 3 (Swimmers in the Sand) covers fossils of early fishes and sharks and ancient ocean mammals and reptiles.

Chapter 4 (The Terrible Lizards) covers the dinosaur world – including the first modern discoveries of dinosaur bones and the general scientific understanding of when and how the dinosaurs lived.

Chapter 5 (Furs and Feathers, Bones and Teeth) covers fossils of ancient birds, saber-toothed cats, mammoths and mastodons.

I've never had a great interest in fossils myself and always tended to skip over the relevant sections of animal books, but I have to admit that this book was well-written and quite interesting.

Reading Level: Ages 9-12

The Art of Construction (originally published in 1979 under the title Building: The Fight Against Gravity) is one of the finest examples of books that help children understand principles of science as applied to real life situations – in particular buildings and making sure that they stay up in spite of gravity and natural disasters.

Children are introduced to important concepts like "tension" and "compression" with simple hands on exercises to help understand and remember them. Most chapters include a somewhat-more-involved construction project to teach these principles (and have a lot of fun in the process). Numerous illustrations make concepts clearer and aid in understanding the building projects.

The text is very engaging and easy-to-understand. We've found it ideal as a read-aloud with a group. Our co-op has been using it somewhere in the 2nd to 4th grade range, although it could certainly be used by much older students (all the way through high school would be reasonable). The engineer dads in our co-op have been very impressed with the book and the concepts the children study.

The chapter titles are as follows (and give you a little glimpse of the content and style):

• From Cave to Skyscraper
• Building a Tent
• What is a Beam?
• What do We Build Structures With?
• The Floor of Your Room
• A Steel Frame...Made Out of Paper
• The Part of the Building You Don't See
• What Tornadoes, Earthquakes and Changes in Temperature Can Do
• How to Fight Tornadoes and Earthquakes
• Ropes and Cables
• Sticks and Stones
• Strings and Sticks
• Shape and Strength
• Barrels, Dishes, Butterflies, Bicycles Wheels and Eggs
• Balloons...and Back to the Tent

Here are a few random sample paragraphs to give you a sense of the style and substance:

"If you had one of your friends put your hands on each other's shoulders and move your feet away from each other, you will become a full arch and feel compressed by each other's weight. But if your shoes slip on the floor and you begin to slide apart, the arch will collapse. Its ends must be firmly anchored to prevent it from spreading apart." (pg. 15)

"The best way to understand how the frame of a building works is to build one. A good model of a steel frame can be built with paper, provided we first build the separate elements of the frame: the columns, the beams, and the floors. A column should not take too much floor room, but must be strong enough to carry the compressive loads without buckling under them. A column buckles, that is, bends under compression along its axis, if it is too thin. Take a plastic ruler, stand it up, and push downward on it: there comes a point when the ruler will bend out." (page 39)

"The purpose of a building's structure is to guarantee that the building will stand up under all the loads and forces acting on it: the weights, the pressure of the wind, the forces due to temperature changes, and, possibly, the shaking caused by earthquakes. The builders want to make sure that the building will not collapse, and they hope it will not even be damaged, since in the first case it may kill people and in the second it may be costly to repair. They also want to make sure that the building will not move around. If a house were to slide down the slope of the hill it is built on, or if a skyscraper were to be toppled by the wind, the buildings would have failed their purpose, even if their structures might sometimes ed up undamaged." (page 57)

This is one of the books that I want to make sure each of my children have a chance to study sometime during their school years. Highly recommended!

This is a fascinating story, told for children and fully illustrated (beautiful full color pictures with interesting and at times humorous details) of the Greek Scientists, Mathematician and Astronomer – Eratosthenes. (Don't worry – the author does help you to pronounce the name). Eratosthenes was born in the 3rd century B.C. in the country we now call Libya to Greek parents. There he was educated in the classical Greel tradition and developed a keen interest in the world around him. As a young man he was sent to Athens to study where he became known as a scholar and historian. At 30 he was appointed tutor to the son of the King Ptolemy II of Egypt and so he settled in Alexandria. He became involved in the great Library at Alexandria where he eventually became head librarian. In this setting he worked on his most famous problem – attempting to calculate the circumference of the earth. The book takes us through the process he went through in solving the problem and illustrates the events and concepts involved in a way that can be grasped by young children (early gradeschool and up – although my preschoolers enjoyed the book without fully grasping all the details). The story is particularly interesting because his calculations were within 200 miles of our present day figures.

We enjoyed this book very much – the content is great and the illustrations are very nice. It would make a fine supplement for Greek History and encompasses a bit of Math and Science as well. The reading level is more challenging than your average picture book (perhaps 4th grade level) but it could be read aloud to younger children.

The author, Mary Daly, explains her book and purposes in this overview.

I have long had a concern about the teaching of science. Most of the materials on the market are so scattered that I cannot think that children will have a clear concept of the meaning and value of science, nor any feeling that they can master its contents in any way. Indeed, most texts are centered on defining science as the product of a specific "method" of thought which has to do with hypotheses and experiments and records and reports. Boring ...and not at all the way Einstein or anybody else I know of actually operated.

Anyway, Natural Science was born in response to the command in Genesis: "Increase and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it." We cannot subdue – or exert stewardship – over what we do not understand. Science is about understanding the material world, our very exciting and beautiful home. In the spring of 2000, members of the local homeschool support group met for a week's science camp, and the next two years, followed up with weekly (almost weekly) science lessons.

The principle of organization is to understand the magnitudes – the sizes – of things and how their scale limits what they can be and do. A star, for example, cannot be much smaller than our sun – except by being fantastically dense – because the nature of stars requires that their gravity bring about their burning. A fly doesn't have enough gravity to burn that way. The planet Jupiter has almost enough.

With the curriculum organized around magnitudes, we had a principle of order for the relationships between all the disciplines of natural science, and as our body of knowledge increased, it was always interactive with previous information. Furthermore, there are only 45 magnitudes between the quark and the universe; this is a small enough number for any child to comprehend. He can finish the course feeling that he knows the universe – and why not? It is his home.

The science camp material is now available, suitable for a camp, or a semester, or up to a year for a small child. It includes:

1. A booklet about the 45 orders of magnitude – sorted by powers of ten – which form the universe as far as we know it. The booklet goes very slowly through the nine orders readily recognizable to ordinary sight – from a meter down to a tenth of a millimeter, and then up to ten kilometers. (It is really essential to use metric measure for this exercise. It is not assumed that the student already knows it.)

2. A set of 45 cardstock dividers, numbered and color-coded, one for each order of magnitude. These are to be placed in a notebook and materials collected illustrating objects at each magnitude are to be placed in each section by the student. These materials can be pasted pictures, drawings, reports, web printouts – whatever best represents what the student has considered at that order of magnitude, and according to his level of comprehension.

The color-coding of the dividers has to do with the fact that the smallest things we consider – electrons and protons, are studied in physics. The next smallest – molecules – are the study of chemistry. Then biology, with green dividers, and so forth.

I will be working to get the following year's lessons into print. They strengthen the magnitudes theme by taking various objects and explaining their characteristics, always in relationship to the orders of magnitude that shape them. Of course the lessons were printed at the time for my students, but not always in a well-finished form...