Before you open it, go and put one ice cube in a dry glass and stand it on the counter.
That is not a stunt. It is the reason this particular title is worth more than its subject sounds, and it is the whole difference between this book and the earthquake one two shelves over. Your child can check this book. Everything it says is happening in your freezer, your kettle and the air in the room, right now, for free.
The book itself is a Graphic Science title, comic panels, Max Axiom in sunglasses shrinking down to particle size to have a look. That is the series and you can read the format description once and be done with it. Agnieszka Biskup wrote this one and the chemical reactions title as well.
The science it actually teaches
It sits on our Stealth Science shelf because the material is the real thing, and because this is the topic that goes wrong quietly. A child can recite solid, liquid and gas for years while believing something subtly false underneath.
The thing to fix is that those three are conditions, not materials. Water is not a liquid. Water is a substance that is a solid in the freezer, a liquid in the glass and a gas above the kettle, and it is the same water all the way through. That sounds obvious written down and it is not obvious at nine.
Underneath it is one mechanism, and there is only one. Heat is motion. Add heat and the particles move faster and get further apart, which is why a solid holds its shape, a liquid takes the shape of the container and a gas fills whatever room it is in. That single idea carries the entire topic, and if your child leaves with only that, the book has paid for itself.
Two of the four states are worth calling out because they are the ones that surprise people. A gas is matter. Air has mass and takes up space, even though a child reasonably counts anything invisible as nothing at all. And matter can skip the middle: dry ice goes straight from solid to gas with no puddle, and so does a snowbank that shrinks on a cold dry day without ever getting the porch wet. Sublimation is a good word and children love it precisely because it breaks the tidy three-step story they were just told.
Plasma is the fourth, if the book includes it, and it is what stars and lightning are made of. It reads as a bonus rather than as part of the lesson.
The last one is quiet and matters most later. Melting changes the arrangement and not the substance. The ice that melted is the same water. Nothing was made and nothing was destroyed. That is the sentence which, a year later, lets a child understand what a chemical reaction is by contrast, because a reaction is the case where the substance genuinely does change.
One honest limit. The particles will be drawn as little balls in three arrangements, packed, loose and scattered. That is the standard picture, it is the right picture for this age, and it is also a model that will have to be unlearned in high school when particles turn out not to be balls. Do not present it as what things look like. Present it as the picture we use, which is a different sentence and takes the same three seconds to say.
The child it lands with
This is the youngest-friendly of the four, and it is the one I would give to a child who has decided science is boring. Ice, kettles and dry ice are close enough to touch that the boredom does not get a chance to set in.
A child who reads it at eight and a child who reads it at thirteen get different books out of it, which is unusual at this price. The younger one gets the three states. The older one gets the mechanism, because heat as motion is a genuinely grown-up idea in a very small package.
The child who will shrug is the one who came to the series for fireworks and explosions. This is a book about ice, and it is quieter than the cover suggests.
One place to stop and talk
Look at the glass on the counter.
The outside of it is wet. Ask your child where that water came from, and hold the line when they say it came through the glass, because that is the answer almost every child gives and it is wrong. Glass does not leak.
The water was in the air the whole time, as a gas, invisible, in the room with you. The cold glass took heat out of the air touching it, the particles slowed down, and they collected back into a liquid on the nearest cold surface. A state change happened on your counter while you were reading, and it went the other way from the one on the page.
What to know going in
This is the gentlest book of the four and there is nothing frightening in it. Which means the honest caution is not about the pages, it is about what happens next, because a book this checkable is a book that sends a child to the stove.
Steam is the one to say out loud. A child who understands that boiling turns water into a gas will want to see it, and steam burns worse than the water it came from, because it dumps a load of heat into skin at the moment it turns back into a liquid. That is not a scare, it is the actual mechanism, and it is the same mechanism the book just taught them. Say it that way and it lands.
Dry ice is the other one, and it is the likelier temptation because sublimation is the fun part. Dry ice causes contact burns and should not be handled with bare hands, and it must never be sealed inside a closed container, because it is a solid turning into a great deal of gas and something has to give.
Neither of these is a reason to skip the book. They are a reason to be in the room.
Where to get it
There is no supply list for this one. No curriculum, no unit study, nothing to print out. It is the title on the shelf that needs the least around it.
The Solid Truth about States of Matter with Max Axiom, Super Scientist is $8.99, which is less than a set of the plastic molecule model kits people buy for this topic, and it does the thing those kits are supposed to do and usually fail at, which is to make a child believe that a rock and a cloud are the same kind of thing arranged differently. Everything else you need is a freezer and forty minutes.
If your child liked this one
Books we have written about that sit close to this one, by reading level and by subject.
Chemical Reactions with Max Axiom: Firework, Firefly, Jar
The Dynamic World of Chemical Reactions with Max Axiom, Super Scientist by Agnieszka Biskup
Grade 4 to 8
The Attractive Story of Magnetism: Down to the Electron
The Attractive Story of Magnetism with Max Axiom, Super Scientist by Andrea Gianopoulos
Grade 4 to 8
Mission to Pluto: One Pass, No Brakes
Mission to Pluto: The First Visit to an Ice Dwarf and the Kuiper Belt by Mary Kay Carson
Grade 5 to 8
Who Was Albert Einstein? The Science Behind the Hair
Who Was Albert Einstein? by Jess Brallier
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.
