Brains On!
Science in all its goopy glory
The Snarf is back! Hope you all enjoyed the summer and the first weeks of what I consider the real new year, which starts after Labor Day weekend.
In case you’re new here, we’re reviewing chapter books while trying to consider everything parents might want to know before picking up a new series. Forwarding this to all your friends, class lists, and parents who might get something out of it has been shown to lead to success in all your endeavors with no ill effects.
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In case you aren’t new here, I’m coming back with a curveball: the Snarf’s first non-fiction review. I don’t anticipate this being a trend, but it’s good to mix things up once in a while. With that, let’s jump into…
The Series: Brains On!
The Authors: Molly Bloom, Marc Sanchez, Sanden Totten
Length/Picture Density: Around 160 pages, pictures and lots of visuals throughout
One thing I love about kid’s TV these days is how much reverence there is for science and scientific thinking. Leo has learned a ton from Wild Kratts, Octonauts, Elinor Wonders Why, and plenty more.
But also, the knowledge transfer is limited. There’s only so much you can communicate in 23 minutes while also telling a story and throwing in jokes and the like.
That’s not a problem for these books, which are long and fully focused on delivering information and understanding. Yes, there is plenty of scaffolding in the form of humor and a light dusting of narrative, but the Brains On books are both fun and dense with information.
Let me back up. Information density obviously isn’t enough to recommend a kid’s book, but I want to differentiate these from stories that have an educational agenda (like Zoey and Sassafras), from these, which have lots of facts on every page. The reason these books are great is because they do that while being legitimately entertaining for kids.
The two books we’re talking about here are a biology-focused one called “It’s Alive!” and a geology-focused one called “Road Trip Earth.” They also wrote a charming picture book called “Earth Friend Forever,” about plastic waste (what’s more charming than that?).
It’s Alive covers animals, plants, humans, and the “microverse,” which is about bacteria, fungi, tardigrades, and other small living things. Each page has a lot of visual activity, with cartoonish illustrations, comics, side panels, and the authors rendered in Simpsons-like drawings making jokes in speech bubbles.
There are lots of different side panels that provide info and anecdotes on related topics, like why cats’ eyes glow. They help to keep the main text focused and on-topic, but can be a little tricky to bring in if you’re reading aloud.
The books are fueled by absurd diversions, like a one-page comic about a store that sells teeth and an imagined face off between a tardigrade and a slime mold (I didn’t know about slime molds. They’re bizarre, and not actually a type of mold).
Be warned that It’s Alive gets gross, because biology is gross. Some of the grossness is segmented off into side panels labeled “Moment of Eww,” so you know what’s coming and can skip it if you’re not in the mood, but, look, you can’t explain the digestive system without some grossness. Road Trip Earth follows all the same patterns as It’s Alive, but it’s not gross, because the topics covered are things like the Earth’s core and other layers, the deep sea, and the atmosphere. I am now armed with information about the troposphere and the deepest hole ever dug.
Road Trip Earth sort of has a narrative — mostly it has a vehicle called the EXPLORERR (extra “r” intentional — it’s a long acronym) that the three authors travel in and modify so it can handle the Earth’s core, the deep ocean, and eventually the upper atmosphere and outer space. Leo loved the vehicle, and didn’t learn the book’s actual title for a long time, because we mostly referred to it as the “Explorerr book.”
Leo got plenty of laughs from these books, even though sometimes the humor went to cultural references and even life-experience references that he didn’t get, but even with those, it still mattered that jokes were attempted. The books constantly signal that they are fun and silly. There is stuff in them that at six is a little tough to grasp, but I imagine he enjoyed them at least as much and learned about as much as an older kid reading them. I’m hoping he returns to them when he’s reading on his own to layer on more of that.
We’re read them both multiple times, and it’s not really because of all the info in them. He’s there for the cartoons, face-offs over which creature or thing is more awesome (ex: Lake Superior vs. the Nile River), side jokes, and frame narratives, like how the human body is presented as an amusement park.
Also, I would be remiss to mention that these books are an off-shoot of the Brains On! podcast. Our podcast listening time is limited, but we’ve enjoyed what we’ve heard. Feel free to drop in reviews (or other podcast recommendations) in the comments if you have listened to it.
I was about to write that these books obviously make sense for kids who love science, but could appeal to a more general audience as well, but at least at Leo’s age, I don’t like designating some kids “science kids” and others “not.” At least the “not” part. I’m hoping at the ages I have in mind here, kids haven’t learned to reject content based on topic area alone. I can see not connecting with the humor or finding the facts a little hard to follow, or just wanting a story instead, but I’m guessing these books can be more than just books for “science kids,” they can show kids how much there is to love about science.