By Colorado Kids Advisory Board member Emily Lewis

Title: Hands-On Science: Matter and Material
Author: Sarah Anglish
Illustrator: David Le Jars
Publisher: Kingfisher


Do you like to do simple science experiments? Here is a book for you to get some of those experiments that you cane try yourself try yourself. In this science experiment book, there are over forty experiments, as it says on the front cover. This entire book is on matter and material, like testing if water expands, or seeing which piece of thread is the strongest.

Throughout this book, there are different types of experiments to do. There are nineteen different sections, one of those being getting started, one being the index, and one being the glossary. In each of the other 16 sections, there are one or two experiments for you to try.

The first section is titled denting and squeezing. The second is Stretching and Snapping. In this section, there is an experiment to see what material is the strongest. You take different materials such as tin foil, saran wrap, and paper and put them around a clothespin. You put it around the clothespin when it is shut, then you open it. By doing this you can see which material breaks most easily.

The next three sections are on Soil, Moving heat, and Solids, Liquids, and Gases. After that, there is Mixing Material, Expanding and Contracting, and Heating Substances. There is also Changing State, Permanent Changes, and Burning. The last five are Sieving Solids, Solutions and Suspicions, Filtering Mixtures, Evaporating Solutions and finally Saturated Solutions. In the Glossary, it tells you the meaning s of all the words you cannot understand. For instance, it tells you that a soluble is a material that will dissolve in liquid.

I would say that this was a pretty good book, but I might not choose it of a bookshelf because it seems a little young for me. I would say this book is good for boys and girls, probably in third or fourth grade. I think that this book is good because it has a section for each experiment that tells you what is happening and why. The book also has a place that tells you how long the experiment will. Most of the experiments take 10 or twenty minutes to do, but there are a few that take longs. One of them takes forty minutes and one of them takes thirty minutes. Some of them take fifteen minutes, and four of them only take five minutes, or so the book says. There are others science books just like this but on different subjects. They are Electricity and Magnets, Forces and Motion, and Sound and Light.

Overall I thought that this was a pretty good book, but if I could have changed anything I would have made it a little bit more grown up and made the experiments harder and ones that you might not already know the answer to. There should also be a little bit better explanations for the experiments. Overall, I would give this book an 8 out of ten! (November, 2002)