What’s The Eight-Year-Old reading this week?
Our mostly-weekly survey of the tidbits that cross The Eight-Year-Old’s desk. Spring break season is upon us, which means lots of time to sit around pouring through some of The Eight-Year-Old’s favorite reference texts. This week, The Eight-Year-Old takes a refresher course in dinosaurs, fancifully illustrated mechanical objects, and natural disasters.
A sampling of this week’s books:
- The Johnstown Flood: National Geographic Reading Expeditions by Rebecca Johnson (Illustrated by Ken Call)
- The Kingfisher Dinosaur Encyclopedia by Michael Benton
- The New Way Things Work by David Macauley & Neil Ardley
This week, The Eight-Year-Old discovered a book in her school library on Hurricane Katrina. The book was written for middle-schoolers, not third-graders, and not surprisingly, it was too graphic for her taste. The photographs of the devastation wreaked by the flood gave her nightmares.
I had expected her to stay away from books about floods altogether after that experience, but she surprised me by bringing home Rebecca Johnson’s account of the Johnstown Flood yesterday. My daughter is made of sterner stuff than I had realized.
The Eight-Year-Old also found time this week to revisit one of our favorite subjects here at Caterpickles: dinosaurs. Mommyo had to renew her passport, and Michael Benton’s Kingfisher Dinosaur Encyclopedia proved to be the perfect companion for the hours we spent waiting in the passport office. The Eight-Year-Old had enough time to read the entire book twice. When we got home, she returned it to the bookshelf, after assuring me that it wasn’t the book’s fault that she got a little bored with it the second time through.
As I type this she’s pouring over David Macauley’s The New Way Things Work, giggling over the silly illustrations and learning a few things about wheels and axles in the process.
In the news:
As always, the Caterpickles News Desk is overflowing with news. Here are a few of the articles that caught our eye this week:
- Ice Age Beast Honked Like a Dinosaur (National Geographic)
- Rare White Giraffe and Other Unusually Pale Animals (National Geographic)
- Navy Pier Ferris Wheel Headed to Branson (Chicago Tribune)
- Math whizzes of ancient Babylon figured out forerunner of calculus (Science)
- Ninja Eagles on Stilts (The Atlantic)
Related Links:
- What’s The Seven-Year-Old reading this week? (Caterpickles)
- What’s The Eight-Year-Old reading this week? (Caterpickles)
- More Book Reviews on Caterpickles
CATERPICKLES 
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