Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I was startled to see that Katie Stokes got her PhD in child development from Stanford. It's quite a highly regarded school. I received a free copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. Unfortunately this book suffers from a severe lack of focus. The information is written at one level… the activities are written at another level far below the first. For example, if I were young enough to want to do a 22 dot straight-line “connect the dots” activity of an ice cream cone (an activity for Taste), I would be way too young to comprehend the number in “You were born with about 10,000 taste buds in your mouth.” If I’m young enough that the simplistic maze activity is interesting to me, I’m therefore way too young to understand the directions to that very same maze: “Help the oxygen O2 get to the alveoli in the lungs.” This book skips unevenly from worksheets like “circle your favorite flavor below” and “draw a picture of something you touch at home" to academic concepts like “Your brain is just 2 percent of your body weight. However it uses around 20 percent of your energy.” And a child young enough for these very easy coloring pages will be scared to death by facts like “By the time you finish reading this sentence, 50,000 cells in your body will die and new cells will take their place.” I can think of no one who is the right age for this book. A child who would like the facts would hate the activities; a child who would like the activities would hate the facts. And I find it bit creepy that all of the human body drawings are the physical proportions of a young child, with its oversize head. A child who still has those proportions has absolutely no business sitting at a table doing worksheets. It is a complete misnomer when it says these are hands-on activities. This is a book of worksheets, and likely one which some well-meaning adult person will think is cute and "educational," foisting it upon children who are too young for it.