Books in Science Nature Guides series

Fly into the world of birds in the most complete guide for kids to North America's birds, featuring range maps, cool facts, fun activities, and detailed descriptions and drawings by Jonathan Alderfer, one of the country's top avian experts and artists.Kids can soar with peregrine falcons or hop with backyard sparrows or sing with robins in the pages of this engaging guide, perfectly leveled for kids just discovering these fascinating feathered friends. With beautiful photography and habitat snapshots, lots of the fun facts kids love, plus interactive birding activities and crafts, the newly updated and expanded guide is the perfect way to bring the fun and amazement of beautiful birds to junior birders. The guide features profiles of 50 of North America's most popular birds--including how and where they live and tips about how to spot, hear, and attract them--as well as mini-profiles of another 100 birds, for coverage of 150 bird species in all.

Grab a beaker, pick up your whisk, and get ready to cook up some solid science. Using food as our tools (or ingredients!) curious kids become saucy scientists that measure, weigh, combine, and craft their way through the kitchen. Discover dozens of thoroughly-tested, fun, edible experiments, sprinkled with helpful photos, diagrams, scientific facts, sub-experiments, and more. And the best news is when all the mad-science is done, you're invited to grab a spoon and take a bite -- and share your results with friends and family.

Beautiful photography and lyrical text pair with comprehensive picture captions in award-winning author Melissa Stewart's story about the surprisingly diverse world of seeds. Learn all about the plant cycle, from how seeds grow, the fascinating ways they travel, and what it takes for a seed to become a plant.Meet seeds that pop, hop, creep, and explode in this vividly illustrated introduction to the simplest concepts of botany. The story, which is perfect for elementary school Common Core learning, carefully highlights the many ways that seeds get from here to there, engaging children's curiosity with strong action verbs. Stunning photographs with fact-packed captions provide supporting details, explaining the role of seed features and functions in creating new generations of plants. Complete with an illustrated glossary and back matter featuring more resources, this book inspires wonder as it encourages budding botanists of all ages to look with new eyes at plants and their seeds.

Space is still the final frontier and Mars continues to make news and attract generations of young people. In this fascinating book, hero-astronaut Buzz Aldrin challenges curious kids to think about Mars as not just a faraway red planet but as a possible future home for Earthlings! What will your new home be like? How will you get there? What will you eat for breakfast? Find out what life might be like far, far from Earth as you navigate your way through this fun and fascinating book. What kid wouldn't want to blast off with him on this (literary) journey!

Budding scientists and kids curious about Earth's next-door neighbor can blast off to the red planet! This highly visual book will cover all kinds of topics, from extreme weather to high-tech rovers to plans for a human colony on Mars. Complete with up-to-date facts about water and all the latest discoveries, Mars: The Red Planet comes at an exciting time for space exploration.

This series is an excellent introduction to the basic concepts of science and nature. Children learn the what, where, how and why of animals, objects, and processes of the natural world. Each volume is packed with fun, easy-to-do projects that engage kids and make science accessible. The Guides are beautifully illustrated and contain a wealth of information for young readers.

Did you know that wild plants are still used for food, for medicines, and as dyes? Many of the plants growing in urban areas, in woods and by the side of roads are useful as well as being pretty. Other plants have small and less obvious flowers: how many have you seen and not realized that they were flowers? This book will show you the most common wild flowers and where you are most likely to find them. A nature guide designed for elementary grades 2-3, the book includes more than 20 easy-to-do science projects.

From the fossil hunter who discovered the Homo naledi fossils in September 2015, this book is an amazing account of Lee Berger’s 2008 hunt -- with the help of his curious 9-year-old son -- for a previously unknown species of ape-like creatures that may have been direct ancestors of modern humans. The discovery of two remarkably well preserved, two-million-year-old fossils of an adult female and young male, known as Australopiitecus sediba, has been hailed as one of the most important archaeological discoveries in history. The fossils reveal what may be one of humankind's oldest ancestors.Berger believes the skeletons they found on the Malapa site in South Africa could be the "Rosetta stone that unlocks our understanding of the genus Homo" and may just redesign the human family tree.Berger, an Eagle Scout and National Geographic Grantee, is the Reader in Human Evolution and the Public Understanding of Science in the Institute for Human Evolution at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa.The focus of the book will be on the way in which we can apply new thinking to familiar material and come up with a breakthrough. Marc Aronson is particularly interested in framing these issues for young people and has had enormous success with this approach in his previous books: Ain't Nothing But a Man and If Stones Could Speak.Berger's discovery in one of the most excavated and studied areas on Earth revealed a treasure trove of human fossils--and an entirely new human species--where people thought no more field work might ever be necessary. Technology and revelation combined, plus a good does of luck, to broaden by ten times the number of early human fossils known, rejuvenating this field of study and posing countless more questions to be answered in years and decades to come.Releases simultaneously in Reinforced Library Binding: 978-1-4263-1053-9 , $27.90/$32.00 Can

This series is an excellent introduction to the basic concepts of science and nature. Children learn the what, where, how, and why of the animals, objects, and processes of the natural world. Each volume is packed with fun, easy-to-do projects that engage kids and make science accessible. The Guides are beautifully illustrated and contain a wealth of information for young readers. The library of Science Nature Guides includes: Amphibians & Reptiles, Birds, Butterflies, Fossils, Freshwater Life, Insects, Mammals, Rocks & Minerals, Seashells, and Wild Flowers. The companion series, The Changing World, teaches kids about the world's ecosystems and natural phenomena: Arctic & Antarctic, Deserts & Dry Lands, Earthquakes & Volcanoes, Jungles & Rainforests, Mountains & Valleys, and Oceans & Rivers.