Sandra Markle has written a pile of these. We carry most of them, and they all work the same way. Pick a body part. Give each animal a spread. Put the real animal on one side and a cartoon of a child wearing that part on the other. This one is ears.
I am going to say that once, here, rather than in every note about this series. It is a paperback picture book for a child in kindergarten through third grade, and you can read the whole thing out loud in about ten minutes. The question worth your time is not what the format is. It is which of them earns your $4.99, and whether you want more than one.
The science it actually teaches
Ears are the odd one in this set, and it is worth knowing why before you spend. Every other book in the series is about something you can watch working. A foot grips. A tooth cuts. A tail swings. Ears do their job silently and invisibly, so this book has to tell rather than show, and that changes what a child takes off the page.
What it gets right is the best single idea in the whole series: one body part can be doing more than one job at the same time. An elephant's ears are enormous, and the size is not really about hearing. Thin skin, a lot of surface, blood running close underneath, and flapping them carries heat away. The jackrabbit's ears get called mood ears here, and that is a third job again, because where a rabbit holds its ears is information other rabbits read.
A child closes this book with the idea that a shape has a reason, and that one shape can have several reasons at once. For a five-year-old that is plenty, and it is more than most nature books this size manage.
What it does not do is explain hearing. Nothing about how a sound gets out of the air and into an animal. A child who finishes this and wants to know how ears work is still going to be asking.
The child it lands with
Four to eight, on a lap or flat on the floor. Nothing in it depends on what came before, so a child will flip through it out of order and lose nothing, which is a real feature at this age.
A child already deep into animals finishes it in one sitting and asks for the next one. A child who is not will still laugh at a kid drawn with elephant ears, and that laugh is the whole delivery mechanism. Not a criticism. It is why the series sells.
One place to stop and talk
Stop on the elephant and ask a harder question than the book does. Not what the ears are for. Ask why the elephant did not just get sharper hearing in a small ear, and then wait. Some children get to the heat on their own, and a child who does has just reasoned out why a body is shaped the way it is.
What to know going in
Nothing in here will upset anybody. No death, no scares, no grief, and the drawings are jokes rather than anything a young child finds unsettling. The honest caution is about depth. It looks like a nonfiction book and it reads like a picture book: one fact per animal, no follow-through, done in ten minutes. If you are buying it as your science for the week, it is not that. As bait it is very good.
The other thing worth saying plainly is that these books repeat. Buy four and your child has read the same book four times with a different body part in it. Buy one, see whether it takes, and let your child choose the second.
Where to get it
Ears is $4.99 at What If You Had Animal Ears?, and it is the one I would buy second rather than first, because its subject is the least visible in the set. Start where the mechanism is right there on the page, feet or teeth, then come back to this one once your child already trusts the format. The rest of the series sits on the Stealth Science shelf. Pick by the animal your child already loves, not by which body part sounds the most educational.
If your child liked this one
Books we have written about that sit close to this one, by reading level and by subject.
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
Animal Teeth: Which What If You Had Book to Buy First
What If You Had Animal Teeth? by Sandra Markle
Grade K to 3
Chameleons Are Cool: The Camouflage Myth, Corrected
Chameleons Are Cool: Read and Wonder by Martin Jenkins
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.
