The bus barely matters in this one.
Ms. Frizzle enters her class in a science contest against Mr. O'Neatly's class. The topic is magnetism and the unit has not been taught yet. Carlos tells the whole thing in the first person, which the picture books never do, and the competition rather than the field trip is what drives the pages.
It is a chapter book. No cartoon panels, no speech balloons, no hand-lettered reports taped round the margins. Short chapters, ordinary paragraphs, line drawings. If your child bounced off the crowded picture-book pages in this series, the format here is the plain one they meet in every other book at this age, and that alone is a reason to try the series again from this end.
The store credits Rebecca Carmi. The chapter books in this line are written under the series name by other hands rather than by Joanna Cole, which is worth knowing if your child came in through the picture books and expects that voice.
The science it actually teaches
This is why it sits on our Stealth Science shelf, and the reason is unusual for a story book. Nothing in it has to be taken on trust. Every claim in this book can be checked at your own table with one magnet and twenty minutes.
Magnets have two ends and the ends are not interchangeable. Push two of the same ends together and they shove back at you. Turn one round and they snap. A child who has felt that in their hands has taken in a force that acts without touching anything, which is a strange idea and the foundation of a great deal of later physics.
Then the sorting, and this is where most children get corrected. Iron answers a magnet. Aluminum does not, copper does not, and most of the shiny metal in a kitchen drawer does not. A child who believes magnets pick up metal finds out in four seconds that magnets pick up one particular metal. The correction sticks because the drawer did it rather than you.
Then reach. The pull passes through paper, through a hand, through the side of a glass. Nothing has to make contact, and a magnet under a table can drag a paper clip across the top of it.
Then the big one, and this is where a five dollar book earns out. The Earth is a magnet. That is why a compass needle swings and settles. The needle is not reading the map it is lying on and it is not reading the ground underneath. It is answering a planet, and a child who has that will never again think of a compass as a gadget.
Last, electricity and magnetism turn out to be one subject rather than two. Wind wire round a nail, send current through the wire, and the nail becomes a magnet that stops being one when you stop the current. Every motor and every doorbell in your house is that idea built properly.
The contest frame is doing real work here rather than decorating. A contest means the children have to show things rather than say them, so the book keeps handing you procedures instead of statements. That is the difference between this title and most story science.
The child it lands with
The seven to nine year old who is moving off picture books and is not sure they want to. Short chapters, drawings carrying a little of the load, nothing hard in it.
The child who takes things apart. This is a book for a set of hands.
The child who has been told answers and did not entirely believe them, because here nothing needs believing.
It is a poor fit for the child who came for the artwork. Anyone who loved Bruce Degen's crowded pages will find these plain, and that disappointment is real rather than fussy.
One place to stop and talk
Do not stop to ask a question. Stop to run one.
Put a magnet on the table with a spoon, a coin, a paper clip, a piece of kitchen foil and a scrap of copper wire. Have your child call each one before it is touched, out loud, and be wrong at least twice. Then ask which of those things are metal. All of them are. Then ask what the magnet was actually sorting for.
Five minutes, and it is the whole lesson.
What to know going in
This is a gentle book. Nobody is hurt, nothing frightening happens, and the worst thing at stake is losing a school contest. That is worth saying plainly, because for most houses it makes this section short.
Two small things anyway. The rival class is set up as the one that always wins everything, and a child who is already sore about competition can take that harder than the book intends. It resolves fine. If winning and losing are a live wound in your house this month, read the last chapter yourself first.
The second thing is not about the book at all, and I would rather say it than not. This book will make your child want magnets, which is the point of it. The small round ones sold as desk toys are very strong, and if a younger child swallows two of them they pull together through the gut wall and that is a surgery. Buy the big ceramic ones or a horseshoe. The hazard is real and it is easy to walk around.
Where to get it
$4.99 at Amazing Magnetism, which puts it on the Stealth Science shelf for about the price of a coffee. The twelve on the cover is a catalogue number and not an order, so starting here costs your child nothing. Buy it with a magnet rather than with the next book in the series, because this one is only half a book until something on your kitchen table moves.
If your child liked this one
Books we have written about that sit close to this one, by reading level and by subject.
The Giant Germ: How an Infection Actually Works
The Giant Germ (the Magic School Bus Chapter Book #6) by Joanna Cole
Grade 2 to 4
A Beehive Is a City: The Magic School Bus Inside One
The Magic School Bus Inside a Beehive by Joanna Cole
Grade 2 to 5
Ada Lace and the Impossible Mission: Scale and Sensors
Ada Lace and the Impossible Mission by Emily Calandrelli
Grade 2 to 5
Browse every book we have written about by age, by kind of book and by subject: Find the right book for your child. Or see the whole Stealth Science shelf.
