Non-Fiction Monday: Billions of Years, Amazing Changes: the story of evolution
by Laurence Pringle. Illustrated by Steve Jenkins. 102 p. Boyds Mills Press, October, 2011. 978-1-29078-727-6. (Purchased.)
Attractively designed, sporting an invitingly bright cover, this gorgeous volume might remind middle school readers of their preschool dinosaur infatuation. Clear, concise and conversational, this is a must-purchase for school libraries, especially if your sixth grade curriculum includes prehistory and geology, as mine does.
Glossy pages sport plenty of white space and either full-color photographs or Jenkins' signature collages. Twenty relatively short chapters walk the reader through time in chapters with names like "Evidence from the Earth;" "How Fossils Form;"through "Moving Continents;" and "Evolution, Going on Right Now." The text is followed by a five page glossary, a list of books and websites, sources, image credits and an index.