My First Book of Evolution

Gr 6-8–While the “my first” construct of the title seems to reference primers for toddlers, this volume provides an excellent and expansive overview of evolution and related topics for upper elementary and middle schoolers. Altarriba and Ferrón fit an engaging and clear introductory biology course into just under 50 picture book pages, including information on how evolution works, Darwin and Mendel, cells and cell parts, DNA, heredity, and more. This is a lot for readers to process; thankfully, the effective visual layout of this title expertly uses various text features such as text size, color, speech bubbles, and more to draw readers’ attention to the main idea and most important aspects of each section. These features can also help adults scaffold the information to share the more basic concepts with younger readers if necessary.