OR PERHAPS you fancy crunching up snail shells before fizzing them to nothingness with vinegar? These are just two of the charming tricks your kids will learn if Santa leaves them a “gross-out” science package.
Artificial vomit features in the Horrible Science Experiments Pack by Nick Arnold and Tony De Saulles. This is not a book but a pack of cards with instructions for home-based experiments bundled up with a pair of good, strong magnets and some balloons. While the package desperately needs improvement, the horrible experiments have their educational value. Not all the experiments are gross. There’s a recipe for invisible ink that also appears in Wendy Madgwick’s Super Materials, a hoard of experiments for five to seven-year-olds. Her cunning plan is to get children exploring material properties by stretching, bending, dissolving, bouncing, floating and sinking everyday materials, from wood and metal to fabric and plastic.
To avoid becoming nothing more than a bookend by Boxing Day, a kids’ science book needs to grab their imagination right from the off. A good way to do this is to tap into that most compelling of subjects: animals.
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No surprise, then, that top of the heap in the latest crop has to be The Hidden Powers of Animals by Karl Shuker. In an intriguing introduction to the world of animal behaviour, he covers everything from the super senses of sight and hearing that some beasts and bugs have, to their emotions, their attack and defence mechanisms – even their humour (ever seen kissing fishes?). Shuker explores the strange effects believed to be based on electromagnetism, such as navigation in migratory birds and whale strandings. Eight-year-olds and upwards will tackle this on their own, but younger children will enjoy the beguiling photography.
And Reptiles by Stephen Savage is a slim colourful guide to the slithery. Big on pictures and low on words, natural history lecturer Savage explains the differences between the multitudinous varieties of reptiles.
Moving on to the very stuff of life, cancer specialist Fran Balkwill has written a splendid cartoon-rich book with illustrator Mic Rolph. In Gene Machines (reading age around seven) they show how all living things are related through their genes. Rolph draws the gut of a human beside that of a mouse to show the similarities due to common genes.
Also rich in illustration are the four volumes of the Cartoon History of the Earth series. I have it on the authority of my nine-year-old that these books are officially A Good Thing. “Books are boring if they just say like ‘planes fly because they have wings’ or something. It’s better if they have fun questions and silly cartoon speech bubbles,” she says. Who am I to argue? She found all these books inspiring. The first, Jacqui Bailey and Matthew Lilly’s The Birth of the Earth, tackles the big bang and the formation of stars and planets.
Older children, especially those who fancy themselves as a bit of an inventor, will enjoy Inventors and their Bright Ideas by Mike Goldsmith and Clive Goddard. This tongue-in-cheek narrative outlines who invented what – and who didn’t invent what they are famous for. People think Marconi invented radio, when he was actually responsible for long-distance transmission of voice via radio waves. Heinrich Hertz, they point out, was there first – broadcasting sparks. Great fun for those “did you know?” factoids kids love. And for scoring points off dozy adults.