Monday, September 20, 2010

Non-Fiction Monday: Is That a Fact?

A few months back, I reviewed a couple of books from a new series called "Is That a Fact?" and this Fall season, Lerner has published even more titles for it, which is very exciting. The series has all the makings of a huge hit among kids, from elementary school alllll the way up to high school, which definitely doesn't happen very often.

I was pretty thrilled to get most of the ones that are new to the series to peruse and share with you!

The first, Do People Really Have Tiny Insects Living in Their Eyelashes? and other Questions about the Microscopic World is by Melissa Stewart and answers questions regarding parasites, mites, and bacteria that have the chance to possibly make us sick (or at least really itchy).

Then I went through Did Greek Soldiers Really Hide Inside the Trojan Horse? and other Questions about the Ancient World by Carol M. Scavella Burrell in which the questions range from those on mummies and whether or not Mount Olympus was a real place, to Romans having such large meals that they had to vomit between course and what Julias Caesar's last words were.

Did Castles Have Bathrooms? and other Questions about the Middle Ages by Ann Kerns obviously focuses on all this Middle Ages. Robin Hood, King Arthur, and dentists all make an appearance in this one.

Can Rats Swim from Sewers into Toilets? and other Questions about your Home by Alison Behnke was probably the most interesting to me. From decapitating ceiling fans to "minute rice" and Betty Crocker, I had a good time learning about household facts and some fiction.

Finally, Does a Ten-Gallon Hat Really Hold Ten Gallons? and other Questions about Fashion, also by Alison Behnke, has all kinds of neat questions about corsets, hoop skirts, and footwear.

These books, like everything else Lerner puts out, are durable (great for libraries) and filled with bright photographs, lots of facts all over the pages, and a readable, appealing format. No long pages of text in these books! Facts and fact boxes galore! Even adults will learn quite a bit and it's fun to find questions that you've wondered about yourself for so long! A glossary is included in the back of each book for help with difficult words/concepts and a section for further reading is included as well.

These would be a really nice addition to any library or for homeschooling families. A non-fiction series that kids are going to WANT to read!

2 comments:

Melissa Stewart said...

Thanks for the nice review. These books are so much fun to research and write!

Julie said...

My 8 year old loves this series of books. We stumbled on them at the library and have checked out 3 so far, we'll definitely be buying the ones the library doesn't have:)
http://apatchworkofbooks.blogspot.com/2010/09/non-fiction-monday-is-that-fact.html
apatchworkofbooks.blogspot.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2017-04
112890
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:YWR36AVAELSUO2YFMXHKJQYJJSF6RGYF
<urn:uuid:a46ba7e8-7603-42f0-9ea4-3fb3ffc44079>
2017-01-18T04:07:06Z
172.217.2.193
sha1:YBRIIFEBSP7CWCS4HQ66V2GJYTIIXZE5
<urn:uuid:23abf444-90a8-4c61-bd5b-97bdbd624dcc>
http://apatchworkofbooks.blogspot.com/2010/09/non-fiction-monday-is-that-fact.html
response
<urn:uuid:580de135-4864-4610-a3e5-6df1546f6e95>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2017-04
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for January 2017
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf