Fourth Grade

• Earth Science
• Engineering & Technology
• Comics / Graphic Narrative

Why it works: Investigating the Scientific Method with Max Axiom gives the superhero scientist a flooding river and a city that needs a defensible prevention plan. Hypotheses, experiments, research, and analysis become steps Max must use to solve the graphic emergency.

• Engineering & Technology
• Physics & Energy
• Comics / Graphic Narrative

Why it works: Science Comics: Cars opens the hood on automobile history and follows the mechanisms that turn gasoline, battery power, or steam into motion. Its illustrated tour connects each propulsion choice to how cars work and to the automobile's wider effects on modern life.

• Astronomy & Space
• Physics & Energy
• Story / Adventure

Why it works: A scientist, his daughter, and the super-computer Cosmos take George through outer space in an adventure that stops for real explanations of the universe and black holes. The fictional transport gives cosmology a plot and a sense of scale while the factual passages supply the science.

• Physics & Energy
• Biography / Memoir

Why it works: Einstein's curiosity and imagination supply the story, while questions about light supply the physics. A child meets scientific thinking as something a person does long before it looks like an equation set.

• Earth Science
• Environment & Ecology
• Story / Adventure

Why it works: The Magic School Bus carries the class through the path water takes into and through a waterworks. By traveling with the water, readers connect the natural water cycle to the engineered collection, treatment, storage, and delivery systems behind a household tap.