By Paul Showers
You eat a hamburger, and this is the whole trip it takes through you, told at the size a six-year-old can follow.
A hamburger goes in the mouth and Paul Showers follows it the entire way. Teeth cut and grind it. Spit softens it and starts breaking it down before it has even left your mouth. The tube behind your tongue squeezes it along in waves, so hard that you would still get it to your stomach if you ate standing on your head. The stomach churns it with juices until it is soup. The small intestine pulls the useful part out into your blood, the large intestine takes back the water, and what is left over comes out in the toilet. There are diagrams and there are things to try, including chewing a plain cracker slowly until it turns sweet in your mouth, which is your spit doing its job where you can taste it.
Digestion is the system children ask about first and it is the one most body books explain at twice their age. This one is pitched right at the bottom of a junior class and still says something true on every page. Showers writes in short flat sentences with no story to sit through, so a six-year-old and a child still finding their feet in English can both hold onto it, and the diagrams carry the parts the words can't. It is a Level 2 in the series, which means it does real content rather than one idea stretched over thirty pages. The cracker experiment is why it sticks: your child tastes the science happening in their own mouth, and nobody forgets that.