By Joanna Cole
Ms. Frizzle's class gets shrunk down and swallowed, and takes a bus ride through a real human body, from the stomach to the bloodstream to the brain.
On another of Ms. Frizzle's wild field trips, the class bus shrinks to the size of a speck and gets accidentally swallowed by Arnold. From there the whole class rides the bloodstream through his body: down into the stomach, out into the blood, through the heart and lungs, into a muscle, and all the way up to the brain, before they have to find their way back out. Every page is stuffed with real diagrams, child-scrawled notes, and speech bubbles explaining how digestion, blood, and nerves actually work. For a child who devours fact books, this is a science lesson that happens to have a story riding along on top of it.
This is the sweet spot for a fact-first child: the density of a nonfiction book, the pull of a story. There is so much real information packed onto every spread, in labels, in the students' reports, in the diagrams, that a fact-hungry child can graze it like an encyclopedia. But Ms. Frizzle's trip gives all those facts a shape and a joke, so a child who won't sit for a plain story stays for the science and picks up the story by accident.