AN ADVENTURE THROUGH THE WATER CYCLE WITH DRIP THE RAINDROP

Name: AN ADVENTURE THROUGH THE WATER CYCLE WITH DRIP THE RAINDROP
Author: Cara Moyers
ISBN: 978-1-4867-2108-5

by Cara Moyers ; illustrated by Charlie Astrella ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 7, 2021

Not a solid choice for science learning.

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An anthropomorphized raindrop leads readers on a simplified trip through the water cycle.

On the first page, narrator Drip’s pictured as a raindrop with big eyes, smiling mouth, and skinny arms; their journey begins on the next spread in a puddle as they wait for the sun to come out and warm the water. Ghostlike, Drip rises into the air, looking down on all the activity below. Drip joins other “H₂O friends” in a cloud as they all form raindrops again and fall during a storm. Drip falls into a mountain stream and then lands back in their puddle before the whole thing starts over again. Moyers’ format and subject don’t always mesh, the cutesy rhyming verses and bouncy meter sometimes forcing word choices that oversimplify the process and/or make it difficult to use solid scientific terms: “Just as I thought, / the puddle gets hot / and up into the air I go! // Now I’m water vapor! / I’m lighter than paper / in a process called evaporation.” Astrella’s animation-inspired scenes look three-dimensional, Drip especially standing out against the backdrop. Backmatter includes a prose summary of other adventures Drip might have within the water cycle (for example, transpiration, groundwater flow), a glossary, and two activities (cloud in a bottle and an evaporation experiment).

Not a solid choice for science learning. (Informational picture book. 5-8)

Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2021

ISBN: 978-1-4867-2108-5

Page Count: 36

Publisher: Flowerpot Press

Review Posted Online: June 28, 2021

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2021

Categories:

CHILDREN'S SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

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BUTT OR FACE?

by Kari Lavelle ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 2023

A gleeful game for budding naturalists.

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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

Categories:

CHILDREN'S ANIMALS | CHILDREN'S SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

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by Kari Lavelle ; illustrated by Bryan Collier

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by Kari Lavelle ; illustrated by Nabi H. Ali

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A PLACE FOR RAIN

by Michelle Schaub ; illustrated by Blanca Gómez ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 12, 2024

Enticing and eco-friendly.

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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)