By R. F. Symes
The one with hundreds of real rocks photographed on white pages, so a child can hold their own gravel-driveway find up beside the picture and figure out what it is.
Every DK Eyewitness book works the same way and this one is the format at its best, because rocks photograph beautifully. Open it anywhere and you get a white page covered in specimens shot up close, a chunk of granite, a slab of slate, a geode split open, quartz crystals, gold, each one labeled with a caption. It goes through how the three families of rock get made, igneous out of melt, sedimentary out of settled grit, metamorphic out of heat and squeezing, and then it does minerals properly: hardness, color, luster, how you tell one from another. There are spreads on erosion, on mining, on what we dig rocks up for, and on fossils. It's a browsing book. You don't read it front to back and it isn't asking you to.
This is the reference spine of the whole unit and it earns that job by being usable by everyone in the room at once. A child who can barely read a paragraph can still work the pictures and captions and come away able to spot mica. A child who reads well can go deep into the mineral-identification pages and start using words like cleavage and streak correctly. Nobody has to be at the same level to be doing the same task, which is exactly what a mixed classroom needs from a fact book. It also survives being handled by twenty-eight people, which is not nothing.