Pages

Saturday, December 12, 2009

The Wonders Inside the Human Body- Silver Dolphin Books

Publisher: Silver Dolphin Books
Copyright: 2009
Review copy provided by publisher

I'm dating myself, but when I was a little girl, one of the books I absolutely loved was the WORLD BOOK ENCYCLOPEDIA, and specifically the H volume of the WORLD BOOK. I loved H because H contained the Human Body. And the Human Body had all of these great color transparency diagrams. First, you saw the outside of the body. Carefully, carefully turn that page, and you saw the nerves and blood vessels. Turn again, and you were inside the body, looking at the organs. I spent hours poring over the pages in that book (and fighting with my sisters over who got to look at the H book, but that's a story for another day).

Recently I received a review copy of THE WONDERS INSIDE THE HUMAN BODY. As I read through it, I felt like I was carried back in time to my WORLD BOOK ENCYCLOPEDIA DAYS, except this book is way, way better than that. WONDERS INSIDE THE HUMAN BODY has over 90 pages of color transparencies, way, way, way cool photographs, sophisticated diagrams, and cut aways. The text in the book is minimal, instead, most of the information is contained in the extensively labeled photographs and diagrams. There are two page spreads on any number of aspects of the human body- different organs, systems, senses, etc.

This book would make a terrific Christmas present. It would be a terrific invitation for those "developing readers" in your life- they could pore over the images in this book for hours, and the need to know about those pictures would get them through the brief amount of text. It would be a great mentor text for a nonfiction unit- you could teach kids about simple and complex diagrams, cutaways, writing interesting captions. There is also a really interesting color coded table of contents.

A plethora of images and information sure to delight any reader…

1 comment:

Mary Lee said...

I'm with you on those color transparency diagrams. Our Social Studies books have them -- the landform, urban, and agricultural regions of Ohio -- yawn -- but they are the kids FAVORITE pages. They go back to them over and over. And surprisingly, they are all still in good shape after all these years! (the pages, not necessarily the regions!!! hee hee)