Seven nonfiction picture books for a room learning to find things out. A six-year-old guessing which animal owns which nose is in the same lesson as the eleven-year-old deciding whether we should spend the money it would take to save the tiger. What ties them together is the back of the book. The notes, the lists, the thank-yous, the where-I-got-this. Because the one question your child can carry out of any of these and use for the rest of their life is: how does anybody know that?
These are seven separate books that never talk to each other, which is the point, because it means seven children can be reading seven different things on a Tuesday and still be in one lesson. But there is an honest thing to say before you start. None of these is a research book. Every one of them is a book that WAS researched, and those are very different, and telling them apart is the actual lesson here. So it's worth being straight about which ones show their working and which ones only tell a good story. Balloons Over Broadway shows everything. Melissa Sweet built her pictures out of Tony Sarg's own world, real 1920s toys, a 1929 book about his marionettes, a 1933 newspaper front page, and then at the back she lists the adult books she read, where every quotation came from, and the people she asked. Locomotive is the other one, with a note on the engine, a list of sources, and an author's note where Brian Floca tells you the railroad he just made your child love was ruinous for the people already living out there. The Boy Who Loved Math does a rarer thing: Deborah Heiligman uses her note to say what she LEFT OUT and why, and LeUyen Pham uses hers to explain the mathematics she buried in the pictures. Then there are the three that don't. Steve Jenkins's two books are marvels of argument, comparison in Tail Like This and scale in Actual Size, and the endnotes are careful and correct, and nowhere does he tell you where a single number came from. Trombone Shorty is the cleanest case on the shelf, because Troy Andrews is the source. It happened to him. There's nothing to cite. Don't grade these books against each other on this. A picture book is allowed to be a story. But a child who has held Sweet's bibliography and then looked for Jenkins's and not found one has learned more about research in ten minutes than a worksheet gives them in a term.