A book that's sure to grab your attention and amaze you. ( )

Didn't love this nearly as much as I wanted to. Nothing in here will take more than 10 minutes or so, with the exception of the experiments like "now leave it in the sun for 10 days!" Probably a great book to give to science-minded kids, but the prep time to get the book, find an experiment, and acquire the proper adult supervision probably isn't going to be worthwhile for a 5- or 10-minute experiment. ( )

We Dare You: Hundreds of Fun Science Bets, Challenges, and Experiments You Can Do at Home by Vicki Cobb and Kathy Darling is full of fun science-based activities for children. Cobb has written over 80 nonfiction books for children and won the New York Academy of Sciences Children’s Science Book Award. The pictures in this book includes that of both people and parts of experiments. Children are conducting the experiments- both boys and girls, with adults supervising. The pictures are of the cartoon nature and include children of different ethnicities; however, more diversity in the ethnicities should have been used, as most of the drawings are of white children. The book is designed especially for children and instructs on conducting experiments, giving specifics on setup, illustrations, and “insider information” on why and how the experiment works. Experiments are about one page in length and are easy for 4th and 5th graders to conduct. One experiment presented is the straw wrapper snake. The experiment examine why a scrunched down straw wrapper can be turned into a dancing snake when drops of water are applied to it with a straw. The explanation in the “insider information” says the reason why the paper snake moves is because the tiny fibers in the paper expand when they get wet, causing the snake to wiggle. Te book has an index and a cross-reference index, as well as a table of contents to make location of experiments/activities easy to find. The book is broken up into several sections: The Human Wonder; Don’t Try This at Home; Going Public; Fluid Facts; Energy Entrapments; Matter of Mystery; Forces of Deception; and Mathematical Duplicity. ( )