Our brains are incredible things. Our brain controls how and what we think and our emotions. It tells our legs how to walk, our muscles how to move and our lungs how to breathe.
In this book the brain itself takes us on a tour to explain exactly what it is and does. It tells us that it is roughly the size of a pineapple and, like a pineapple, has a hard outer shell called the skull for protection from being hurt. Inside the skull it is a lump of jelly like goo that you shouldn’t touch. The brain is made of hundreds of billions of cells all connected to, and ‘talking’ to each other. And there is electrical activity running all through it. It’s one very complicated body part!
It explains that it is the part of you ‘that is you’ and where everything happens. It is where you feel sad, happy, or scared. It’s where you remember how to spell, or when your birthday is. Sometimes, it tells us it doesn’t work quite so well especially when it’s tired or feeling a bit emotional. But mostly it works very well without us paying attention. It tells us how it started off small and grew over time changing as it developed new skills. While it is like other ‘lumps of goo,’ there are differences to the brains of your friends or family.
The artwork is mixed media and ‘the brain’ in its explanations makes clever use of the pineapple motif to establish what it can do but what pineapples cannot do. This is a fun way to learn about the brain. The illustrations are bright and expressive, and the text provides basic facts and information about the brain. At the back is a double page spread of information about the various areas of the brain but also qualifying that no one truly knows how the brain works and that there is still a lot to learn.
This book would be a great basis for a student project complete with models based on the illustrations of the brain.
Picture Books for Older Readers
