Max Axiom shrinks himself down and rides through the vein of a leaf. That is the pitch, and for this particular subject it happens to be exactly the right one.
You already know the format if you have seen any of these. Skip past it. What matters is the match. A comic is a sequence of places drawn in order. Photosynthesis is a sequence of places that things pass through in order. Liam O'Donnell got the topic in this line that the format was built for, and our store bands it at grades 4 to 8.
Ignore the description on the product page, by the way. It calls the subject matter physics and Earth sciences. It is neither of those. It is plant biology with a chemical reaction at the middle of it, and that paragraph is series boilerplate pasted onto every title in the line.
The science it actually teaches
Short section, because the book is tight and so is the topic. It sits on our Stealth Science shelf for six things, and a child can come out holding all six.
Light, water and carbon dioxide go in. Sugar and oxygen come out. That is the reaction, and a child who can say that sentence in that order has the spine of it.
It happens in a specific place, not vaguely in the plant. Green bodies inside plant cells hold a green pigment, and the pigment is what catches the light. Which leads to the answer to a question every seven year old asks and nobody answers: leaves are green because the green is the part of the light the pigment does not use and throws back at you.
There is plumbing, and it is drawn. Water arrives from the roots through the veins your child can see on the underside of any leaf in the yard. Gas moves in and out through pores on the leaf surface that are far too small to see and are absolutely real.
The oxygen is a leftover. The plant is not making it for us. It is making sugar, and oxygen is what is left over from taking water apart, and the entire breathable atmosphere is a plant byproduct. That is worth a minute of silence at any age.
And the sugar is food. Not food the way sunlight is loosely called plant food, actual food, made of carbon that used to be gas in the air. The plant burns some of it to live, exactly the way your child burns breakfast, which means plants both make and use, and that surprises most adults.
The reason this note is shorter than our others in this series is that the book does not need me. The topic has a shape, and panels are good at shape.
The child it lands with
Any child who thinks plants eat dirt, which is every child, and most of the adults reading this.
Beyond that, the one who has already been made to label a diagram of a leaf and found it pointless. Labeling is not understanding. Watching something travel through a leaf is closer.
One place to stop and talk
Go outside and find the biggest tree in reach. Put a hand on it. Ask where all of it came from.
Almost everyone says the soil, and the answer is no. Dig around a big tree and the hole you would need to account for its weight is not there. Most of that trunk is carbon, and the carbon arrived as an invisible gas through holes in leaves too small to see, and the water came up from the roots. The tree is made of air and rain and sunlight, assembled by the green stuff inside cells your child met in the cell book.
That is the best question in elementary biology, and this is the cheapest way I know to earn the right to ask it.
What to know going in
This is a gentle book and I want to say that plainly, because a parent scanning cautions should know when there is nothing waiting. No death, no peril, nothing to time carefully.
The caution that is real is about what it will and will not do for you. The reaction at the middle of this book is chemistry, so words like carbon dioxide, glucose and chlorophyll turn up, and a child who has never been told that everything is made of molecules will meet that idea here for the first time and may need you for ten minutes. And the band tops out optimistically. This is a solid grounding for fourth through about sixth grade, and it will not carry a high schooler through light-dependent and light-independent reactions, which is a level of detail no comic is going to reach. Buy it as the foundation, not as the course.
Where to get it
$8.99 at Understanding Photosynthesis with Max Axiom, Super Scientist, which is the cheapest fix I know for the most common wrong idea in elementary science, the one where plants eat dirt. Read it second in the Max Axiom biology set, straight after the cell book, while the green bodies inside a plant cell are still fresh and your child can be shown what they are for. Its neighbors are on the Stealth Science shelf.
If your child liked this one
Books we have written about that sit close to this one, by reading level and by subject.
The Shocking World of Electricity: Inside the Wire
The Shocking World of Electricity with Max Axiom, Super Scientist by Liam O'Donnell
Grade 4 to 8
Adventures in Sound: Physics You Can Hear at Home
Adventures in Sound with Max Axiom, Super Scientist by Emily Sohn
Grade 4 to 8
Emi and the Rhino Scientist: How One Calf Happened
Emi and the Rhino Scientist by Mary Kay Carson
Grade 5 to 8
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.
