Johnny Ball

This is an amazing read for students that have a little spare time. This book teaches thousands of interesting facts about measuring, mapping, timing, and creating. The amazing part is that it all has to do with math! In the book you can learn why your geometry teacher makes you do all those weird half circles and makes you measure angles because the Romans and even Galileo used the same methods we use. Thanks to them our world is so much more exciting and precise and this book explores all those wonders. One page shows all the history and hard work it took to map the world. People like Ptolemy, Archimedes, and Mercator were the ones that made it possible, and from everything that I read about that I can tell you it wasn’t easy! If a student has any scientific or mathematic questions there is a huge chance that this book can properly inform them.… (mer)

This book talks about how people in ancient times made their buildings/roads without any technology or a standard ruler. Most of the time they estimated on how long roads had to be by using their own measurement tool... their body. Other times, they used the moon and stars to estimate. The more they measured, the smarter they got. Because of this, this is how we got here today. Without curiosity, where would be in 2017?

This book answers all of these following questions and so much more. It starts from ancient Egyptian times and ends with modern times.
*How long is a month and why is it that number? *What do the sun, moon, and stars have to do with time? *The mystery of building the Great Pyramids in Egypt. *How did the Egyptians make the Great Pyramid so perfectly shaped? *The pyramids line exactly with the points of a compass... but how if they were built thousands of years before a magnetic compass was invented? *What do stars have to do with sailing? *Who decided to divide the day into 2 sets of 12 hours? *An hourglass, water clock, shadow clock, and sundial; what are these, how were they made, and how do they work? *What is atmospheric pressure? *What are newtons, joules, watts, and horsepower?

The book is filled with so much knowledge that it can be considered as a resource book to give a brief description/history of whatever math/science question you need to find out. Or it can be read for fun with the sense of wonder it gives the reader of how and why things exist. Within the book, it includes little pictures with humorous speech bubbles. This makes the book not so overwhelming with an abundance of facts.

The content is extremely informational and keeps the reader's curiosity constant. I aim this towards grades 4-8th due to all of the material it has in it.… (mer)