By Donald M. Silver
It hands your child one square of pond, about a yard on a side, and tells them to look at it again and again until they actually know what lives in there.
There is no story here. The book is a set of instructions. Pick one square of pond, roughly a yard on each side, from the mud at the bottom to the air just above the surface. That is your square. Now look at it, and keep looking: in daylight, after dark, and across a whole year, because the square in April is nothing like the square in August. Patricia Wynne draws what is in there in cutaway: the whole square in cross-section with every layer labeled, then closer, then closer again, down to the things swimming in a single drop of water. And it runs on things you do. It shows you how to make a viewing scope out of a can, how to net the water without wrecking the place, how to keep a record of what you find. There is a field guide at the back to help you name things and a glossary for the words you won't know.
What sets it apart is that it teaches a method, not a place. Most habitat books say, here is a pond, here is what lives in it. Silver says, here is how you find out what lives in a pond, and now go do it on the one near your house. Pick a square. Look at it again and again. Write down what is there. That is the actual method working ecologists use, scaled down for a nine-year-old and not dumbed down along the way. Run it once, even on a puddle, and a child has done real fieldwork instead of reading about it.