Does anyone else remember the animated science show on PBS called Eureka? Well, it is probably not surprising that bother NerdDad and I loved this show as kids. So NerdDad set to searching this out for the Nerdlings and Eureka! he found them. There are 30 pieces of episodes over at YouTube. We have downloaded them and uploaded them to the Tivo. NerdBug and NerdPie are loving them. They may not understand all the complex science but they ask to watch them over and over. So I am sure that the science will sink in! So I don’t know who BubbleBear83 is but I appreciate the effort. Now that is using the Internet to our advantage!
grabbed my attention. This isn’t a planned area of study for the NerdBug but hey, I love science and it looked fun. Now I am in love;). This book has the perfect balance of child friendly wording, illustrations and touching on actual full concepts. For example it gave the actual formula for Universal Gravitation, the actual explanation of the formula and then had a child like explanation. The more advanced explanation is separate from the “book” so you can avoid it if you would like. The illustrations are colorful and helpful to concept understanding. What is really cool is that Branley has written a variety of other books. So he may become the NerdFamily’s favorite author!
to his siblings and myself today. They all loved it! It had the right combination of easy words and words that needed to be sounded(like marsupials and pouch). This can also be said of another of Levine’s books, 
. The information in both books is great. It has great individual facts that can mesh to a more complex development but also stand alone as facts. That is great for my 6 and 4 year old because it seems that the individual facts are what they glom onto at this age (as is fitting in the classical model;). I will be looking for more books by this author for my kids to read so I highly recommend it!
and they loved it. It starts with a list of words to look out for and later defines them in the glossary. We used the list as a built in list of review questions. It does have some difficult and unfamiliar words (such as thorax and larva) so while most words are simple enough for a first grader, I would have them read it close so you can help with those words. We just read is aloud with the 6, 4, and 2 year old. It has great pictures and diagrams. We will be requesting the rest of the books in this series from the library.
by Melissa Stewart. This book was horrible. To kick off our unit on an animal I read a 1 page summary on them and then we get an additional book. Well, this book took each little fact and made pages on it, pages I said. Now I am not saying they enriched the material on it or went further in detail. They simply took 1 fact and drug out the wording to take a page. So first strike it wasted words. Second strike is it bored you to death doing it. The we get to decide to embark upon the ice age and evolution. On the whole I strongly disliked this book and will not be using it when my other kids do sloths in the future.
chapter. My first grader could read many of the words but still needed some guidance but it is not real juvenile so one could use it probably in higher grades also. This is a book I will use again with other children.