Stand at the edge of a pond at midday and look straight down. You get sky, a cloud, and your own face looking back at you.
This book is what is on the other side of that. Kate Messner and Christopher Silas Neal take a mountain pond and cut it open: the mirror on top, minnows in the open water, beavers going down and coming back up, tadpoles turning into something else along the way. There is a glossary at the back naming the animals that live in the pond, near it and around it.
It is $19.99, which makes it the expensive one of the five, and that fact gets its own paragraph further down.
The science it actually teaches
The mirror is not the book being poetic. Light hits a water surface and a good deal of it comes straight back at you, so from above you get a reflection instead of the water. That is why your child cannot see into the pond and concludes the pond is hiding. It is not hiding. They are standing in the wrong place, at the wrong angle, at the wrong time of day.
Underneath, the pond is stacked. The surface, the open water, and the mud at the bottom are three different addresses, and the animals sort themselves into them. Minnows are open-water animals. The mud belongs to somebody else. A beaver is interesting precisely because it crosses those lines and then surfaces to breathe on top of all of them.
Two more worth naming. Tadpoles growing is metamorphosis on the page, and it is worth saying out loud to a five year old that the tadpole and the frog are the same animal, taken apart and rebuilt, in one summer, in one pond. And a beaver does not only live in the pond. It builds the pond. There are not many animals a young child meets that manufacture their own habitat, and it is a bigger idea than it looks.
One caveat that is really a strength: this is a mountain pond. Cold water, a particular cast of residents. It is not a stand-in for the warm green pond at the bottom of your road, and the book is better for being about somewhere specific.
The child it lands with
You already know if this is your book. There is a pond, or a slough, or a ditch that holds water until July, and your child goes and stands at it and comes back with a jar.
That child gets the most out of it. So does the one who liked the snow book and wants the next one. The store band is K to 3, and the vocabulary sits at the top of that band rather than the bottom, so five is a read-aloud and eight is on their own.
On our Stealth Science shelf this is the water book, and there is very little else at this age that treats a pond as a structure instead of a scene.
One place to stop and talk
This is the one book in the series with a real experiment attached, and it costs nothing.
Take the book to actual water on a bright day. Have your child look straight down from standing height first. Sky. Then have them kneel, get their eyes near the surface, and look down steeply rather than across. More water, less sky. Then have them cup both hands around their eyes like blinkers and try again. Best of all, spend two minutes first making a viewer: cut the bottom out of a plastic tub, tape cling film tightly over the hole, and push that end an inch under the surface. The reflection goes away and the pond opens up.
Now the question, and hold it until they have done all of it. Why did changing the angle change what the water did? Nothing about the pond changed. What changed is where the light had to go to reach their eye. That is a real physics idea arriving through a real pond, and it stays put in a way a diagram does not.
If you own polarized sunglasses, that is a fourth round and a good one. Glare coming off water is exactly what that lens was built to cut.
What to know going in
The price is the caution. This is $19.99 and the snow book in the same series is $9.99, same shape, same kind of book. You are paying double, and nothing on this page is going to tell you the extra ten dollars buys ten dollars more book. It does not. It buys a different habitat.
The second thing is the title. What the product page shows is the publisher's search-stuffed string with half a dozen extra words bolted on. The book on the cover is called Over and Under the Pond. If you go looking for it anywhere else, that is the name to use, and you have not bought some strange variant edition.
It is a food web, so minnows get eaten and the book does not pretend otherwise. That is the right call and it is very mild.
Last one, and it is the real limit. If there is no standing water within reach of your family, the best part of this book, the part where your child goes and checks, is not available to you. It still works. It works about half as well.
Where to get it
Over and Under the Pond is $19.99.
Do not make it your first one. Over and Under the Snow is half the price and it is the book that teaches the trick all five of these run on. Buy this second, and buy it soon, if your family lives near water and your child has already started asking questions you cannot answer. If you live somewhere dry, buy the canyon book instead and come back to this one after a trip.
If you are only ever going to own one of the five and there is a pond in your life, then ignore all of that and make it this one.
If your child liked this one
Books we have written about that sit close to this one, by reading level and by subject.
Over and Under the Rainforest: It Is Central America
Over and Under the Rainforest by Kate Messner
Grade K to 3
Surprising Sharks: What the Word Shark Actually Covers
Surprising Sharks: Read and Wonder by Nicola Davies
Grade K to 3
Animal Scales: Fur, Feathers and the Same Five Jobs
What If You Had Animal Scales!? or Other Animal Coats? by Sandra Markle
Grade K to 3
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.
