Mobiles: Building and Experimenting With Balancing Toys (Boston Children's Museum Activity Book)

From School Library Journal Grade 3-7-- Continuing his series of successful science books, Zubrowski presents simple activities to demonstrate various concepts of balance. Clear instructions and easy-to-find materials (cardboard, coat hangers, and paper clips are typical) ensure that most children will be able to complete the projects on their own. Doty's line drawings are cartoonlike, but useful and precise. The projects neatly build upon one another, gradually moving into more complex challenges. When materials can be reused for another experiment (and much of the cardboard can), it is noted in the text. A "what's happening" section follows each set of activities, explaining concepts such as balancing points and lines of symmetry, which the preceding experiments demonstrate. The title is slightly misleading, since the book focuses on balance in general, not just mobiles. Readers may be disappointed to find that no actual mobile projects appear until page 75. Instead, the first three-fourths of the book is devoted to various balancing toys and objects. While not especially fun as toys, they do convey information about properties of balance effectively. When readers finally construct the mobiles in the last fourth of the book, they should have an excellent grasp of what makes them work. This offering is as good as Howard Smith's Balance It! (Four Winds, 1982; o.p.), and superior to Jennings's Balancing (Watts, 1989) and Fitzpatrick's Balancing (Silver Burdett, 1988). --Steven Engelfried, Alameda County Library, CACopyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.