BFSU B5: Food Chains, and D4: Biomes

One of my favorite topics! This is not anything new to Calvin, really, but we had a good time really talking about food chains, and getting more specific about biomes than we have in the past. In addition to reading, hiking, and watching some videos, I found great maps on this site: I printed this one to color in, and brought this up on the screen for copying.

Who Eats What? Food Chains and Foods Webs. Patricia Lauber (1995). A Let's Read and Find Out About Science, book. Honest, forthcoming, and unflinching with simple illustrations, some crayon drawings that will encourage a child to get in on the action themselves.

What is a Biome? Bobbie Kalman (1997). Very informative but without being too dense. Photographs and illustrations are realistic and make great aids. My only complaint is that it can feel a little scattered, with too many tidbits added outside of paragraph text, but it's no DK nightmare book, and I found it completely usable.

Staying Alive: A Story of a Food Chain. Jacqui Bailey (2006). Another unflinching look at life, this book looks specifically at the food webs of the African Savanna, which makes it a good book to connect the topics. Comedic illustrations and interjections keep things funny, but can be distractions from the important text. Again, not on the level of a DK book, just minor distractions.

Pass the Energy, Please! Barbara Shaw McKinney (1999). Rich illustrations and rhyming text set this food chain story apart from the rest. I've reviewed this one before. It's a beautiful look at the significance of food chains. The rhyming can be stilted in some areas, but the book is well worth reading.

Life On Earth: The Story of Evolution. Steve Jenkins (2002). A wonderful explanation of the process of evolution and overview of the ongoing nature of time with Steve Jenkins's fantastic illustrations of pieced paper. This is another book to which we have returned many times. We have it in our personal collection, purchased used because, unfortunately, it's already out of print. What were they thinking???

We also watched all the Schlessinger Biomes in Action videos, which were available on DVD from our library. Their science videos (like all their vidoes) are cheesy, but they lack the flashing lights, quick changes, and gimics of other, more recent children's videos that are so distracting while providing good information. Each video shows kids (middle school age maybe?) visiting world biomes, and also running some (albeit questionable) experiments in a school or home lab setting. Calvin enjoyed them all.