Best Children's Environment & Ecology Books

In this cautionary rhyming tale we learn of the Once-ler, who came across a valley of Truffula Trees and Brown Bar-ba-loots, and how his harvesting of the tufted trees changed the landscape forever. Published in 1971, and perhaps inspired by the "save our planet" mindset of the 1960s, The Lorax is an ecological warning that still rings true today amidst the dangers of clear-cutting, pollution, and disregard for the earth's environment. Long ago this enterprising villain chances upon a place filled with wondrous Truffula Trees, Swomee-Swans, Brown Bar-ba- loots, and Humming-Fishes. As the trees swiftly disappear and the denizens leave for greener pastures, the fuzzy yellow Lorax (who speaks for the trees "for the trees have no tongues") repeatedly warns the Once-ler, but his words of wisdom are for naught. But as you might expect from Seuss, all hope is not lost--the Once-ler has saved a single Truffula Tree seed!

This Newbery Honor-winning, hilarious Floridian adventure involves new kids, bullies, alligators, eco-warriors, pancakes, pint-sized owls, and more. Characteristically quirky characters and comic twists will surely gain the author new fans, though their attention may wander during his narrative's intermittently protracted focus on several adults, among them a policeman and the manager of a construction site for a new franchise of a pancake restaurant chain. Both men are on a quest to discover who is sabotaging the site at night, including such pranks as uprooting survey stakes, spray-painting the police cruiser's windows while the officer sleeps within and filling the portable potties with alligators. The story's most intriguing character is the boy behind the mischief, a runaway on a mission to protect the miniature owls that live in burrows underneath the site. Roy, who has recently moved to Florida from Montana, befriends the homeless boy (nicknamed Mullet Fingers) and takes up his cause, as does the runaway's stepsister.

The hysterical #1 New York Times bestseller from Newbery honoree Carl Hiaasen featuring gators, snakes, bats that bite, and reality show hosts gone wild! But the job keeps getting more complicated: Derek Badger insists on using wild animals for his stunts; and Wahoo's acquired a shadow named Tuna—a girl who's sporting a shiner courtesy of her father and needs a place to hide out. “Only in Florida—and in the fiction of its native son Carl Hiaasen—does a dead iguana fall from a palm tree and kill somebody.” — New York Post “ Chomp is a delightful laugh-out-loud sendup of the surreality of TV that will be enjoyed by readers of all ages.” — Los Angeles Times “ Chomp shines in its humorous, subtle tweaks on pop culture. Grown-ups might stop you in an airport and tell you they like the novels, but kids will sit down and write a three-page letter, complete with illustrations. They're sharp and perceptive, and they really love the irreverent point of view in the books. Reality television taps into the same human impulse that makes you slow down on the highway to gawk at a six-car pile-up. Beside Jon Stewart, the best comedy on television is Finding Bigfoot and some of these other reality shows. Poisonous snakes, gators, crocs, iguanas, black widow spiders, all that stuff. In Chomp, both Mickey and Wahoo are fearless when it comes to snakes and other wild beasts (and nutty people, for that matter)--do you have any animal phobias? A. I just thought it would be cool to name a boy after Wahoo McDaniel, who played for the Dolphins when I was a kid. And the reality, sadly, is that some kids go home every night wondering if their mother or father is going to hurt them. In Scat I had a character whose dad comes back very badly injured from Iraq. You clearly have the single word title thing going for your kids’ books, is that just something you started with and stuck to, or is there more to the story? I have a son in middle school (and also grandchildren), and none of them are ready to read the Big Person novels yet. A. I was at a book-signing in Boulder, Colorado, when a very nice woman told me she'd named her cancerous tumor after a character in one of my novels.

This Newbery Honor-winning, hilarious Floridian adventure involves new kids, bullies, alligators, eco-warriors, pancakes, pint-sized owls, and more. Characteristically quirky characters and comic twists will surely gain the author new fans, though their attention may wander during his narrative's intermittently protracted focus on several adults, among them a policeman and the manager of a construction site for a new franchise of a pancake restaurant chain. Both men are on a quest to discover who is sabotaging the site at night, including such pranks as uprooting survey stakes, spray-painting the police cruiser's windows while the officer sleeps within and filling the portable potties with alligators. The story's most intriguing character is the boy behind the mischief, a runaway on a mission to protect the miniature owls that live in burrows underneath the site. Roy, who has recently moved to Florida from Montana, befriends the homeless boy (nicknamed Mullet Fingers) and takes up his cause, as does the runaway's stepsister.

Suddenly, Brian finds himself alone in the Canadian wilderness with nothing but a tattered Windbreaker and the hatchet his mother gave him as a present—and the dreadful secret that has been tearing him apart since his parent’s divorce. This Newbery Honor book is a dramatic, heart-stopping story of a boy who, following a plane crash in the Canadian wilderness, must learn to survive with only a hatchet and his own wits. Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. Grade 8-12 Brian Robeson, 13, is the only passenger on a small plane flying him to visit his father in the Canadian wilderness when the pilot has a heart attack and dies.

Suddenly, Brian finds himself alone in the Canadian wilderness with nothing but a tattered Windbreaker and the hatchet his mother gave him as a present—and the dreadful secret that has been tearing him apart since his parent’s divorce. This Newbery Honor book is a dramatic, heart-stopping story of a boy who, following a plane crash in the Canadian wilderness, must learn to survive with only a hatchet and his own wits. Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. Grade 8-12 Brian Robeson, 13, is the only passenger on a small plane flying him to visit his father in the Canadian wilderness when the pilot has a heart attack and dies.

Inspired by the original Hogwart’s textbook by Newt Scamander, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them: The Original screenplay marks the screenwriting debut of J.K. Rowling, author of the beloved and internationally bestselling Harry Potter books. J.K. Rowling is the author of the bestselling Harry Potter series of seven books, published between 1997 and 2007, which have sold over 450 million copies worldwide, are distributed in more than 200 territories and translated into 79 languages, and have been turned into eight blockbuster films by Warner Bros. She has written three companion volumes to the series in aid of charity: Quidditch Through the Ages and Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them in aid of Comic Relief; and The Tales of Beedle the Bard in aid of her children's charity Lumos.

provides the answers—with fun, accurate, comic-book-style artwork and a clear, lively text that reflects the interests of children age seven and up in how things work, while giving them a healthy understanding of their bodies. Created by the author and illustrator of It’s Perfectly Normal, this forthright and funny book has been newly updated for its fifteenth anniversary. An inquisitive, loquacious bird and an embarrassed bee act as comic and straight man and serve as diverting foils to Harris's conversational narrative; kids will both identify with and chuckle at the two characters' reactions and asides. Specific topics covered include changes in boys' and girls' bodies during puberty, intercourse, birth control, chromosomes and genes, adoption and adjusting to a newborn sibling. The roster of experts in the closing acknowledgments speaks to the sensitivity and intelligence with which Harris and Emberley handle their treatment of masturbation, sexual abuse, HIV and AIDS and homosexuality. Emberley's artwork ranges from lighthearted cartoon panels of a talking sperm meeting up with an egg in the fallopian tube to straightforward drawings of reproductive organs and a developing fetus.

The definitive book about puberty and sexual health for today’s kids and teens, now fully updated for its twentieth anniversary. Gr 1 & Up—These highly acclaimed titles have been go-to guides for a whole generation of children, teens, and their parents wishing to address these delicate, often difficult-to-discuss topics. It's Perfectly Normal, which is geared toward children nearing puberty, has sold more than one million copies, been translated into more than 35 languages, and has been endorsed and used by teachers, librarians, clergy, health care and mental health professions across this country. It also has the distinction of being listed as #7 on the American Library Association's list of most frequently challenged books of the 21st century.

You can discover the answers to these questions and more with The Everything Kids' Easy Science Experiments Book . Using easy-to-find household materials like soda bottles and flashlights, you can build bubbles, create plastic--even make raisins dance! This is the perfect book for a rainy Saturday, a lazy vacation day, or even after school. Tom Robinson teaches high school science and math and has coauthored an online advance placement physics course.

This is the story of the atomic bomb. This fascinating tale, packed with a wide cast of characters, focuses mainly on three individuals: spy for the Soviets Harry Gold, leader of the Manhattan Project J. Robert Oppenheimer, and Knut Haukelid, who sabotaged German bomb efforts while working for the Norwegian resistance. It's also an excellent primer for adult readers who may have forgotten, or never learned, the remarkable story of how nuclear weaponry was first imagined, invented and deployed--and of how an international arms race began well before there was such a thing as an atomic bomb.” ― The Wall Street Journal. “This is edge-of-the seat material that will resonate with YAs who clamor for true spy stories, and it will undoubtedly engross a cross-market audience of adults who dozed through the World War II unit in high school.” ― Bulletin of the Center of Children’s Books, starredreview.

• Chapter 2 introduces kids to the other planets in our solar system. --The Children's Nook Blog “Featuring fun, short entries about planets, stars, galaxies and more, this charming book is perfect for reading aloud or for beginning readers to enjoy themselves.” --Today's Zaman CATHERINE D. HUGHES is the author of National Geographic Little Kids First BigBook of Animals , National Geographic Little Kids First Big Book of Dinosaurs , and is the science editor for the award-winning National Geographic Kids and NationalGeographic Little Kids magazines.

Award-winning artist Sylvia Long and author Dianna Hutts Aston have teamed up again to create this gorgeous and informative introduction to seeds. Readers not yet familiar with cursive writing may experience some difficulty deciphering portions of the text independently, but this book is a wonderful addition to units that focus not only on seeds and plants, but also on writing and the language arts.– Maura Bresnahan, High Plain Elementary School, Andover, MA Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Paragraphs in smaller print, which tackle science concepts and expand on the phrases, are geared to older readers. But the elegant watercolor pictures, which include helpful charts depicting a seed's growth into a plant, will pull children into the basic botany, while the pages filled with enticingly detailed seeds, both common and exotic, will encourage kids to wonder about the plant world's mysterious, gorgeous spectrum of possibilities.

Hands-On Family: Kitchen Science Lab for Kids offers 52 fun science activities for families to do together. Soon she found herself sharing her love of science with her three kids as they grew, journaling their science adventures on her KitchenPantryScientist website. Her desire to spread her enthusiasm for science to others soon led to a regular segment on her local NBC affiliate, an opportunity to serve as an Earth Ambassador for NASA, and the creation of an iPhone app, with the goal of making it simple for parents to do science with kids of all ages, and for kids to experiment safely on their own.

Animal Stories for Kids: Coyote Peterson's Brave Adventures: Wild Animals in a Wild World chronicles some of the wildest encounters Coyote Peterson has had over the course of his travels. Coyote Peterson, host of the Brave Wilderness YouTube Channel and the Emmy Award winning show, Breaking Trail, is an avid adventurer and animal expert.

In WWII times, Adolf Hitler ordered the book burned in Nazi Germany, while Joseph Stalin, the leader of the Soviet Union, granted it privileged status as the only non-communist children's book allowed in Poland. Ferdinand is a little bull who much prefers sitting quietly under a cork tree-- just smelling the flowers--to jumping around, snorting, and butting heads with other bulls. In a show of bovine irony, the one day Ferdinand is most definitely not sitting quietly under the cork tree (due to a frightful sting), is the selfsame day that five men come to choose the "biggest, fastest, roughest bull" for the bullfights in Madrid.

Famously packed with information on the inner workings of everything from windmills to Wi-Fi, this extraordinary and humorous book both guides readers through the fundamental principles of machines, and shows how the developments of the past are building the world of tomorrow. Parking meters and meat grinders, jumbo jets and jackhammers, remote control and rockets, electric guitars and egg beaters? "Things," both in the real world and in this book, have changed. VERDICT A delightful choice for browsing and reference.—Patricia Manning, formerly at Eastchester Public Library, NY Amazon Best Children’s Books of the Year: NonFiction San Francisco Chronicle Best of 2016 New York Times Bestseller "... long-awaited update to one of the more original books ever printed." The author is honest enough to say that the book was intended for children of all ages, and brilliant enough to make all its readers feel brighter than they ever thought they could be.”— The New York Times “ The Way Things Work is not the only book that has tried to explain modern mysteries, but it's the best. It justifies every critic's belief that information and entertainment are not mutually exclusive - good nonfiction is storytelling at its best.” — The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books , starred review. “Combining the tongue-in-cheek observations of a budding prehistoric engineer with acute descriptions of the functioning of mechanical and electrical machines, Macaulay has produced a superb volume.”­— The Horn Book, starred review. “A book to be treasured as both a browsing item and as a gold mine of reference information.”­— School Library Journal , starred review.

Linking to a popular feature in the super successful National Geographic Little Kids magazine, this book brings the browsable fun of the bestselling National Geographic Kids Almanac to a new audience: preschoolers! She has written several popular titles, including Little Kids First Big Book of Why and numerous installments for the National Geographic Readers series.

How much do kids really know about Albert Einstein besides the funny hair and genius label? Grade 3-5-This biography describes Einstein's early struggle to harness and focus his extraordinary abilities; his relationships with his family and first wife; and, lending depth to the story, his most significant scientific discoveries.

On a windy autumn day, Marla Little comes running down the hill, yelling, “Help! The author uses repeating sentence structures to capture young listeners’ attention and give early readers confidence. “This is an award winning quality children's book that will entertain young and old alike. “This was a clever story written in a manner that may well render it timeless, as it evokes classic tales that will leave you feeling nostalgic.”. “One word comes to mind when describing Daniela Volpari's art: quintessential.”. “The story and art, together with the professional book design ranks this title up there with the best of the bunch. “I enjoyed this very simple story which is great for one year olds, but more for early talkers around three because it will start conversations.”. "Marla Little's pumpkin is rolling away!

--Hans Camenzind, inventor of the 555 timer (the world's most successful integrated circuit), and author of Much Ado About Almost Nothing: Man's Encounter with the Electron (Booklocker.com). --Tom Igoe, author of Physical Computing and Making Things Talk. A new shopping guide and a simplified range of components, will minimize your investment in parts for the projects. A completely new section on the Arduino shows you how to write properly structured programs instead of just downloading other people's code. Projects have been reworked to provide additional features, and the book has been restructured to offer a step-by-step learning process that is as clear and visually pleasing on handheld devices as it is on paper. Hans Camenzind, inventor of the 555 Timer (the world's most successful integrated circuit chip), said that "This is teaching at its best!"

--Hans Camenzind, inventor of the 555 timer (the world's most successful integrated circuit), and author of Much Ado About Almost Nothing: Man's Encounter with the Electron (Booklocker.com). --Tom Igoe, author of Physical Computing and Making Things Talk. A new shopping guide and a simplified range of components, will minimize your investment in parts for the projects. A completely new section on the Arduino shows you how to write properly structured programs instead of just downloading other people's code. Projects have been reworked to provide additional features, and the book has been restructured to offer a step-by-step learning process that is as clear and visually pleasing on handheld devices as it is on paper. Hans Camenzind, inventor of the 555 Timer (the world's most successful integrated circuit chip), said that "This is teaching at its best!" He is the author of the highly successful introductory hands-on book, Make:Electronics, and is writing a sequel to that book in addition to volumes 2 and 3 of the Encyclopedia of Electronic Components.