The Kingfisher First Human Body Encyclopedia

Like all the other Kingfisher "First" books, this one is lovely and well suited to elementary-age minds and reading levels. Lots of pictures and nice, large print; lots of cool experiments. As for the controversial section on reproduction, this is exactly how it reads: "To make a baby, a man puts his penis inside a woman's vagina to release sperm. The sperm swim toward the egg and fertilize it. The fertilized egg grows into a baby inside the uterus." Frankly, if I could re-write or delete one sentence from this book, I would find nothing else objectionable--but I'm just not sure my six-year-old is ready to wrap his head around this information.

Nice pictures, good index and TOC. You can find just about whatever you need to explain to young kids about their bodies.

I am a homeschooler. I love Kingfisher products. This book is easy for my 1st and 3rd grader to do on their own as supplementary reading.

My daughter of 7 enjoyed my wife's anatomy books and this book was a nice, at her level, book that complimented the college level books.

I actually first looked at this book just because it only had a one star rating and I wondered why. When I learned that, it was because it had children's level sex ed I bought it immediately. My 5 year old was trying to figure out what a birthday was for and I needed a little visual assist to help him understand that he came from my belly on that day. Really, the sex ed of this book is perfect for small children. It shows a big blow up of an egg surrounded by sperm. It has two basic anatomy drawings of what is in a woman and what is in a man with no deep detail; they are small and dull in comparison to the Sperm and Egg multicolor blow up of a microscope picture. It shows on the next two pages a baby developing in the womb. It's just drawings and it has an ultra sound of the profile of a baby's head. Nothing about how the baby gets in there, nothing about how it comes out, just very basic things a small child can understand (I highly recommend it for the 5 year old set). It is very colorful and shows much of the anatomy in relation to children's bodies. The whole book is wonderful. It is drawings and pictures of all the major systems of the body. They are detailed enough that you can see all the stuff that is under our skin, but it is written simply. On the muscles of the face, rather than name them they say, "These muscles make you blink, these muscles make you smile." Very kid friendly and related to questions kids will ask. This is good for a beginner reader who is old enough to be curious about how the body works. It also has little boxes at the bottom of many pages with experiments that kids can do to give hands on visuals about the lessons presented. My son has been fascinated by it since it arrived and looks through it at least once a day. He spends time marveling at the pictures and how cool people are on the inside. There is nothing gruesome in it though it does broach things like available artificial body parts. I guess it could be useful in explaining Grandma or Grandpa's operation. What I like the most is, it has real anatomical pictures with captions that are kid friendly and easy to understand. I highly recommend this for small children so long as you are comfortable with them knowing about all of their body parts and not just some of them.