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This is a terrific children's picture books, with lots of details about different parts and features of caves, how caves form and plants and creatures that can live inside of caves. Gail Gibbons has a nice balance of real information that is presented in an easy-to-understand format.

Here's a little sample of the style and content:

"Next, the cavers carefully enter the variable temperature zone. The temperature doesn't change as much here as it does in the twilight zone. Mushrooms, molds, and other fungi grow here. It is dark!"

Sometimes your casual pick-up-what-looks-good from the library hits jackpot--last week it was one of those instances for us. Close to the Wind by Peter Malone gets very close to being the picture book par excellence. In every aspect, this gem brings the very best of the world of picture books: beautiful, detail-rich illustrations, a captivating story, plenty of educational content, and great use of visual diagrams, side notes and explanatory illustrations.

Good picture books, I am always exclaiming, are so helpful in the homeschool. What did we know about the Beaufort Scale before this find? Next to nil. Now, not only we learned about the useful scale that measures wind based on detailed observations, we also learned information on ship-building, sails, the life of sailors, curious entries in sailor's glossary, how many trees are cut down to build a ship, and the sad destiny of many ships after their many years of service.

In the Van Cleave tradition, this book presents 101 experiments that are simple, yet informative, and can easily be performed in the home. The book covers seven major segments: Earth in Space, Rocks and Minerals, Crustal Movement, Erosion, Atmosphere, Weather and Oceans. Some experiments are designed to demonstrate, with simple objects, properties of the earth and its components such as "how the composition of the Earth affects its motion" and "how the speed and direction of air affect falling rain." These type of experiments generally cover things which can't be directly experimented with but can be understood through other things. Other experiments determine actual properties by experimenting with salt, water, ice, etc. to more directly understand how they work.

This simple, nicely illustrated (cartoon-like pictures) children's book explains important concepts of science in a very easy-to-understand fashion. The reader is introduced to the way thunderclouds form and where thunder and lightning come from. The scientific content is substantial and very accessible. The story line is rounded out with tips for staying safe during a storm. My children have been fascinated by the details about the inside of a thundercloud, how fast sound and light travel, how you can measure the distance thunder travels and more. This title has been a big favorite with all of my children for a number of years and, rather than being made nervous by the dangers mentioned in the book, a little knowledge seems to be a comforting thing.

A history and science picture book that covers the development of man's understanding of the shape of the earth focusing on the discoveries of the Greeks and on the voyages of Christopher Columbus and Magellan.
Currently out-of-print

This weekend we rented Journey into Amazing Caves (an IMAX film). It's a beautifully filmed documentary that traces a group of scientists' explorations into caves in the Grand Canyon, ice caves in Greenland and underwater caves on Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula. The scientists are searching for "extremophiles" - bacteria and other small creatures that survive extreme conditions and may be useful for medicines.

Just the natural beauty of these remote places is absolutely breathtaking. But watching the "making of" gives you an even greater appreciation as you realize the challenges and dangers of "extreme photography". Wow.

My children saw this before I had a chance to. I heard them from the other room going ... Woah... Woooah.... Wooooooah... as the team kayaked down a beautiful river.

The movie references the website of one of the team members who also works as a teaching assistant and put this website together for her grade school class...Nancy's Expedition Diary (I especially liked the Q & A in the "Ask Nancy" part.)

We love these kinds of documentaries that "work" for a wide age range and help spark an interest in science while providing some real substance. I have to admit that it was quite delightful the next day to see my 8 year old daughter out in our cold, snowy backyard digging into our sandbox and pretending she was a scientist "out exploring."

Seymour Simon, famous for his children's science books illustrated with stunning photography, hits another home run with Lightning. This fascinating book details facts and fascinating statistics about lightning with lots of the "wow!" effect that helps keep middle-schoolers interested in science. Did you know that scientists have discovered new types of lightning within the past ten years? How long would the electricity from one bolt of lightning power one lightbulb? These and many more fascinating photos and facts await the reader of this very nice science book. I really like to have these kinds of books around my house to help my children get a lot more out of science than I did as a child.

A surprisingly interesting (and fairly in-depth) picture book that introduces children to minerals - which include metals and gems. Many full color photos highlight and enhance the text, which covers topics such as Mohs' Scale of Mineral Hardness, ice crystals, cleavage planes (the way minerals break when cut) of various minerals, metals in their natural state, special metals like gold, silver and platinum, how various minerals form and what they look like in their natural state. My children and I found this to be quite an interesting book.

I really didn't expect to get much out of a children's picture book on rocks. Rocks are, well, rocks! I was wrong. Mrs. Kittinger has done a fine job in presenting various types of rock, how they are formed in nature (with a significant emphasis on volcanoes) and the various fascinating and often beautiful varieties of rocks. There are many stunning photos and fascinating statistics on rock-related items from Mount Rushmore (and it's lesser known "sister-sculpture" - Stone Mountain - of some "monumental" figures of the Confederacy) to the Grand Canyon to amazing volcano formations. The book also includes a glossary, an index, suggestions for further reading and internet resources for rock collectors.

The Seashell on the Mountaintop is a very welcome biography of St. Neils Stenson, also known as Nicholas Steno and about 16 other variations. The good news is that, after years of neglect, this convert, this holy man, and this founder of the science of geology is being pulled from the edge of oblivion to be remembered for his true greatness. The title of the book refers to the presence of fossil shells in the mountain soils of Italy and , among other places, and the long effort to interpret such a curiosity. As a Dane, Neils had not grown up in the presence of fossils, but he went to Italy as an adult and joined the academy that had been Galileo's fellowship a generation earlier. Here he took an interest in everything around, including the hills of Tuscany and their shells.

The geology part is interesting because Steno's ideas were so far ahead of others' that those who were interested in figuring out the fossil puzzle read them for a hundred years before they were able to take the next step in building the science. During his own lifetime, Neils was famous for he was a seminal thinker on several topics, but by the time the geologists were able to build on his work, his extraordinary personality was almost forgotten although, even today, the principles expressing our basic understanding of sedimentation are still called Steno's laws.

Cutler's gives a striking account of the competing ideas about fossils in Stenson's days – late 17th century. Did shell forms naturally grow in the soil? And if so, did they grow with breakages and wormholes and all, just as if they'd been on the shore? Were they dropped by Noah's Flood? If so, how had they come so far inland; many thought that Noah's finding a live tree branch after the flood meant it could not have brought salt water all the way inland everywhere. Cutler presents all this material thoughtfully and in a manner respectful of the mental challenges of another age, so easy to underestimate.

Not only the shells interested Neils, but also the faith of Italy, and though welcomed by the Florentine academy as a Lutheran, he became a Catholic in time, then a priest, and finally a very holy bishop of a vast tract of Lutheran Europe, for whose salvation he relinquished his scientific investigations and then sacrificed his health.

This is a good introduction to the 17th century, to geology, and to a saint with a wonderful, Renaissance mind.