Is a Blue Whale the Biggest Thing There Is? (Wells of Knowledge Science Series)

We love this book! My 5 and 3 year old boys are just fascinated by the increasing size comparisons. I love books that open their minds to understanding the world (And universe!) we live in and this one does just that in an easy to follow, fun way! Totally recommend it!

I have used this book with several grade levels effectively. I originally purchased the book to give my third grade social studies class in an inner city New York school a concept of how high Mt. Everest is when they were studying China. They became so fascinated that we postponed the Himalaya lesson and ended up reading to the end of the book. They loved it! There are so many ways this book can be used with a classroom. It's a great way to involve children in the concept of estimating and they really get into guessing "how many" or trying to predict the very biggest thing there is. School age children enjoy the challenge of seeing how long it takes to count to 100 and then guessing how long it might take to reach a larger number. The children began asking "how long" to count to millions and billions if you counted 24 hours a day, creating a teachable moment when I helped them use math skills to discover the answer, which led to a discussion about setting up counting 'tag teams', if counting that long was feasible...the educational oportunities are endless, especially if you let the children's curiosity and creative thinking lead the lesson. All this was just from the first page of the book! I plan to purchase more books by this author in the hope they are equally thought-provoking.

This is one of my favorite books. Every class I've ever used it with, from 1st grade up to 5th, has been fascinated. The illustrations are eye catching and perfectly correspond to the text. Literature should be intergrated across the curriculum. This book can help introduce lessons on big numbers and place value. It can also be used to tie into science lessons, with the size of the solar system or animal species. All elementary classrooms should have a copy of this book. It is both educational and interesting.

Fourth graders find this book amazing when beginning a unit on the solar system. It helps them put the size of the Earth in perspective compared to the sun and other planets. I use an accompanying sheet that asks the children to number all of the objects from the book (a whale, the sun, etc..)in order according to size. Then they check their answers as I read the book aloud. It's a wonderful way to open the unit! Definitely get this book and try it!!

Fantastic book, despite the nit-picking in one of the editorial reviews above. This book really helps little kids come to grips with the idea of relative size. My preschool and kindergarten ESL students will founder when asked to understand/believe that a little patch of color on a globe is their country (Taiwan). Heck, kids this age don't even have much idea what a country is, let alone how big it is in relation to anything else. But this book sure set some lightbulbs to poppin' over kid's heads! That's how I measure the success of my classes and the materials I use in them, and by that measure, this book is a clear winner of the Darryl Award for Excellence in Children's Literature in the Field of Science and Mathematics!The perfect book to partner with this book is the excellent Big Blue Whale by Nicola Davies (see my review of it). The focus Ms. Davies book is the whale itself. I found that using Ms. Davies' book before Mr. Wells' worked very well indeed.