Notable Notebooks: Scientists and Their Writings is a children’s picture book. The author, Jessica Fries-Gaither, wants children to see how scientists have used notebooks in their work. So the book talks about lots of different scientists and what they studied, and why that was important. It talks about Galileo, and Isaac Newton, and an astronomer named Maria Mitchell who discovered a new comet. There was a man named Charles Henry Turner who studied insects and discovered that they can hear and learn, and there was another man, Lonnie Thompson, who took pictures and made drawings that showed that the glaciers were melting.

“Isaac Newton was a genius;
he truly did it all.
Complex calculations
in his notebook he did scrawl.”

The science and the things that the scientists were studying are really interesting, but this book is kind of annoying. You only get to learn a little bit about what the scientists did, and you get to see a picture or two from their notebooks, but not very much. The illustrations are colorful and would be interesting to really little children, but the children that age are probably too young to be interested in what the scientists were learning. The writing is really annoying. It is all written like a not-very-good poem that is hard to read. The point of the book is to tell you how important scientists’ notebooks have been, for them to figure things out and then to share that with other people. At least that is a good message.

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