By Franklyn M. Branley
The gentle read-along about why the ground shakes, with cutaway drawings that slice the Earth open so your child can watch a fault slip.
Branley starts underground with the plates, the huge slabs the Earth's surface is cracked into, and shows them pushing past each other until the rock can't hold and slips. That slip is the earthquake. Megan Lloyd draws it all in cutaway, slicing the ground open so you can see the fault, the layers of rock, the mountains and volcanoes riding on top. From there the book climbs to the surface: the shaking, the split roads, buildings coming down, and a wave rolling ashore when a quake happens out at sea. The last pages get practical. How scientists measure a quake, and what you do if you're ever in one. It's forty pages of big type, a Stage 2 Let's-Read-and-Find-Out, the tier written for a child who can read but still wants you sitting next to them.
This is the one I'd reach for with the youngest or the least sure readers in a group that's all studying the same thing. It carries real tectonics, plates, faults, seismic waves, in sentences a six-year-old can hold, so a child at the bottom of the reading spread isn't handed a baby book while everyone else does actual science. They're doing the actual science too, just in fewer words. The 2015 edition was checked by an earth-science professor at Berkeley, which matters since the text first came out in 1990. And it ends on what to do if you're ever in one, not on how bad they get.