Late Elementary

• Astronomy & Space
• Engineering & Technology
• Expedition / Survival

Why it works: New Horizons has a destination, a nine-and-a-half-year journey, strict engineering limits, and a once-only encounter with Pluto. Following the team as they build the spacecraft and interpret its images turns planetary geology and remote exploration into the unfolding discoveries of a mission.

• General / Multiple Sciences
• Expedition / Survival

Why it works: In the Field with National Geographic tells the organization's 135-year story through the explorers, scientists, educators, photographers, and innovations that carried questions from Everest to microscopes, deep seas, and space. The changing people and tools make multidisciplinary discovery an expedition history rather than an encyclopedia of subjects.

• Earth Science
• Life Science
• Comics / Graphic Narrative

Why it works: Science Comics: Dinosaurs follows a century and a half of fossil hunters as discoveries repeatedly change the dinosaurs people draw and describe. The history becomes an evidence mystery in which feathers, bones, field finds, and competing interpretations revise the scientific picture.

• Astronomy & Space
• Earth Science
• Comics / Graphic Narrative

Why it works: Science Comics: Solar System sends Sara, Jill, and their space-faring pets on a quest past Venus, Saturn, the Sun, and other neighbors. Acid clouds, icy rings, giant storms, and the solar system's dusty origin turn each stop into a distinct planetary environment rather than a decorative backdrop.

• Life Science
• Comics / Graphic Narrative

Why it works: Science Comics: Dogs sends a friendly mutt after his lost ball while he investigates dogs' wolf ancestry, breed differences, and intelligence. His personal quest gives genetics, evolution, and behavior a comic character arc from predator origins to human companion.

• Engineering & Technology
• Comics / Graphic Narrative

Why it works: Science Comics: Robots and Drones gives Pouli, an early mechanical bird, a funny journey from tea-serving automata to factory robots, flying drones, and Mars rovers. His travels reveal how robots sense, follow instructions, move, and change when people design them for different jobs.

• Astronomy & Space
• Engineering & Technology
• Comics / Graphic Narrative

Why it works: Science Comics: Human Spaceflight turns the race between the United States and Soviet Union into a visual history that moves from first orbit and Moon landing to international work in an orbital laboratory. Rockets, orbital speed, microgravity, and daily-life design problems explain both the rivalry's milestones and the later cooperation.

• Life Science
• Environment & Ecology
• Comics / Graphic Narrative

Why it works: Science Comics: Sharks dives from hammerheads and great whites to nurse sharks and the extinct megalodon while challenging the monster image people give them. Four hundred million years of adaptations, varied habitats, and predator roles turn fear into a visual investigation of shark diversity and ecological importance.

• Life Science
• Environment & Ecology
• Comics / Graphic Narrative

Why it works: Science Comics: Cats ranges from the tiny kodkod to the tiger and neighborhood cat to investigate what the feline family shares. Teeth, claws, camouflage, habitat, and domestication carry the visual journey from wild predator to human companion.

• Life Science
• Environment & Ecology
• Comics / Graphic Narrative

Why it works: Science Comics: Deep-Sea Creatures descends among giant isopods, colossal squid, lampreys, and anglerfish as if readers were exploring the abyss beside them. Each dramatic creature makes sense only through the linked constraints of darkness, scarce food, and crushing water pressure.

• Life Science
• Chemistry & Materials
• Story / Adventure

Why it works: The Universe in You reverses a cosmic zoom and carries readers inward past skin, cells, molecules, atoms, and particles too small to measure directly. Jason Chin's visual journey makes each scale change a new destination and lets nested structure, not a list of definitions, organize the science.

• Life Science
• Earth Science
• Comics / Graphic Narrative

Why it works: Science Comics: Prehistoric Mammals travels from dinosaur-era survivors into jungles, oceans, deserts, and the Ice Age to ask how mammals spread into so many roles. Climate shifts and changing habitats drive the appearance of hooves, claws, tusks, large brains, and blowholes across the visual history.

• Astronomy & Space
• Story / Adventure

Why it works: Jason Chin begins with an eight-year-old reader and repeatedly zooms outward through buildings, Earth, the solar system, the galaxy, and the observable universe. The visual journey makes otherwise abstract measurements feel like a sequence of nested places whose scale can be compared step by step.

• Life Science
• Human Body & Health
• Lyrical / Visual Picture Book

Why it works: Nine Months follows a family of three waiting through winter, spring, and summer for a baby's birth while parallel illustrations show development inside the womb. The family's anticipation supplies the story, and the changing fetal images make human growth visible month by month.

• Life Science
• Environment & Ecology
• Lyrical / Visual Picture Book

Why it works: Coral Reefs begins with an ordinary library visit and lets a girl's city dissolve into the coral cities inside her book. Jason Chin's visual transformation makes reef organisms, hiding, hunting, and ecological connections into a journey the reader experiences alongside her.

• Life Science
• Environment & Ecology
• Story / Adventure

Why it works: Redwoods transforms a boy's ordinary train ride into an imagined journey among coast redwoods and giant sequoias. The visual shift in scale lets tree height, age, structure, and forest habitat unfold through wonder and movement instead of a conventional tree encyclopedia.

• Life Science
• Story / Adventure

Why it works: The book treats the egg as a design puzzle, moving among animals that hide, carry, abandon, disguise, or defend eggs in different ways. Its visual comparisons turn reproduction and parental behavior into a sequence of surprising solutions rather than a chapter of definitions.