Picture Books That Make Science Feel Like Looking Closely

Put your hand beside the gorilla's on the page, or see how your eye compares with a giant squid's. Jenkins's illustrations give those comparisons a scale a child can judge without a ruler. Read it when a number alone would leave the size of an animal hard to imagine.

Sylvia Long's watercolors give you a chance to compare a redwood seed with a coconut and look at the fluff tucked into a milkweed pod. Ask what you might look for if you wanted to find the seeds on a plant you already know. The pages make that a question about size, shape, and where to look.

Wick's photographs stop a drop as it falls and show what happens when it hits a hard surface. Another image puts a snowflake close enough for you to count its points. Let a child pick one photograph and describe the detail the camera caught that their eyes might miss.

Emily Sutton's illustrations enlarge living things far too small for the unaided eye. Davies uses an ant's antenna as a point of comparison before showing how microbes turn up in familiar places and help make yogurt. It's a good way into a question children can return to: how do you learn about something you can't see directly?

Christopher Silas Neal's pictures look at a pond from both sides of its surface. Above, you can see the sky reflected in the water. Below, look for minnows and tadpoles, then imagine which signs of them someone in a boat might be able to spot.

Gail Gibbons’s diagrams show how the moon’s orbit changes how much of its sunlit half we can see. Compare the drawings of the phases, then keep a calendar of the shapes you see outside. When the sky clears again, look for what changed since your last entry.

Sarah S. Brannen's pictures set feathers and birds beside familiar objects. Compare the feathers on a willow ptarmigan's feet with snowshoes, then see what a sandgrouse's feathers have in common with a sponge. Each comparison gives children a clue to what a feather does.

Rebekah Raye's pictures make a temporary pool on the forest floor worth a second look. Search for wood frogs, spotted salamanders, and fairy shrimp, then use the sidebars to learn what brings them there. Choose it for a child who would like to know when a puddle becomes habitat.

Turn a cutout page and a lake's outline becomes the outline of an island. The same shape can describe water enclosed by land or land surrounded by water. Try finding another pair before unfolding the map to see where those shapes occur in the world.

Jamie Green brings the view down to the forest floor. Compare the shapes of the caps before following the book's pictures out of the woods to see where airborne spores can go. Zimmermann's discussion of spores gives children a way to think about the life of a fungus beyond what they can see.

Diana Sudyka's paintings ask you to search the ground and the water as well as the sky. Pause at a scene and see if you can work out what a bird is doing where you found it. On a walk, the book's habit of listening quietly gives you another clue about where to turn your eyes.

Aimée Sicuro's night skies accompany a story about watching carefully enough to notice an unexpected pattern. Vera Rubin and her colleagues found that stars far out in galaxies were moving faster than expected. Read it with a child who wants to know how the motion of things we can observe might point to something we can't see.

The same rock can be a resting place or a spot to find food, depending on the animal that visits it. Follow one rock through Wenzel's changing pictures, then pick an ordinary spot outside and see which animals, if any, use it over several visits.

The photographs show drops on insects and birds and rolling down a pumpkin. Compare the same bit of weather on several surfaces, then look for a leaf after a shower and describe where the drops collect. The closing pages connect those details with how water behaves.

Pictures of an approaching storm and a visiting cow give Oscar reasons to pay attention to the sounds around him. Ask which sound might be loud or soft, near or far, or high or low. Then close the book and pick a sound in your own room to describe.

Matthew Forsythe's illustrations follow Ken Nedimyer and the work of growing coral and grafting it onto reefs. Look for how a small piece of coral fits into the much larger reef scene. It gives children a concrete example of what restoring a habitat can involve.