A Tour of the Human Body, factoid fun for grades 1-4

For a period in every elementary student’s life, they are factoid machines. They have competition between themselves to seek out and parrot one or two-line facts about animals, the more disgusting, bizarre or unknown, the better. This is the age of the exception. Kids may not be able to tell you how many ounces are in a pound, but they’ll be able to tell you at a moment’s notice that you swallow an average of 1,500 pounds of food a year. A Tour of the Human Body: Amazing Numbers-Fantastic Facts is an illustrated book that introduces elementary-aged students to this bag of flesh, organs and bones that accommodate us during our time on Earth.

The edible fact is followed up by equating it to how many camels you would eat during the same time and how many tyrannosaurus rexes that would equal during your lifetime. It’s the ridiculous and impossible act of a human eating a camel whole, much less seeing a tyrannosaurus rex that drives home the value of that number. This also subconsciously tricks your brain into remembering the figure, which might inspire more curiosity or at a bare minimum allow kids to repeat the fact ad nauseam until they find a use for it.  It’s one camel and nine dinosaurs-which breaks out into 55 tons of food consumed over your lifetime.

25 feet is either the total length your bones would stretch if they were placed end-on-end, the length of your intestines if stretched out or how long the fingernail in your pinky grows over your lifetime. A Tour of the Human Body is loaded with illustrated-heavy facts like this that you probably have never thought of, but can’t get them out of your head once they’ve come on your radar.

There is a very loose sense of story and rhythm in A Tour of the Human Body, but not so much that young readers will turn to any page in the book and not be able follow what’s happening. It starts with a macro look at body, how many cells make it up, touches on the senses, the highway of blood vessels that connect them all and ends with a big picture connection of many people there are on the planet and how much we all have in common.

In those final pages of the story, the book’s mission that it’s there to share numbers and facts about the human body, is clearly stated. Those pages are geared at lower to middle-elementary ages and while those younger ages might need some assistance the first time they encounter the book, those middle-elementary folks will be able to read the terms and follow along unguided. The sentences are presented in the book with varying offset types but do not rhyme. This is not a poetic-centered illustrated STEM book, it’s more direct and asks young readers to be entertained through illustrations, quirky human details and big or small number statistics that their parents don’t know.  

That is the 85% of the book that’s aimed at most elementary school students. The final 15% is aimed at the middle school kids or adults who are reading the book to those elementary ages. These couple of pages are paragraphs that further explain the main points that the book brings up, like cells, the brain, nervous system and so forth. As with the smarter STEM books aimed at elementary school students, there are two pages with author’s notes, sources and resources for more reading. It’s worth noting that the final two pages are interactive and teach (young) people how to calculate how much blood is in your body, take your pulse, and challenges them to accurately count the number of bones in their hands.

Without looking it up online, can you calculate how much blood is in your body? For an elementary-age student to legitimately know something productive and informative that their parents and teachers don’t know is a big morale booster. These are the STEM factoids that pepper a kids conversation if they’re in second through fourth grade. It’s relevant, important stuff that’s not largely know to non-doctors, and is hopefully just enough to make them curious about what else they don’t know.

A Tour of the Human Body: Amazing Numbers-Fantastic Facts is by Jennifer Berne with illustrations by Dawn DeVries Sokol and is available on Kane Press, an imprint of Astra Books for Young Readers. There are affiliate links in this post.