Maria Mesires
Seventh Grade Science Teacher, for NSTA Recommends

One Minute Mysteries: 65 Short Mysteries You Can Solve With Science is a wonderful read for intermediate age children. The stories illustrate science concepts from life science, Earth and space science, physical and chemical science, and general science. There is also a bonus section of five more mysteries as well as five math one-minute mysteries.

The stories are written by a father-daughter author team and are applicable stories from everyday life. The stories are short enough to read in a small span of time with the scientific answer given on the next page with an explanation. The scientific principles are some of the most commonly well known, delivering just enough challenge for your students to deduce the mysterious explanation.

I highly recommend this book for the classroom either for students to read for fun or to be used by the teacher to underscore some basic scientific concepts. This is an interesting book and a good addition to any classroom environment.

Susan Dubin
Library Consultant, Off-the-Shelf Library Services, Northridge, CA

Platypus Media books celebrate families, and they embrace diversity. Library patrons will find them wonderful for family reading time. Teachers will appreciate the simple stories and the activity guides that will teach their students about their families, their communities and their world. Parents and children learning English together will relate to the bright photographs and the simple vocabulary. Young children especially will enjoy the fresh look at the world around them. They are a natural choice for library storytimes, parents and children reading together, and classroom use.

Janet Jacobsen
Child Center, Springfield, SD

Look What I See! Where Can I Be? is a five-book series featuring a guessing game written from a baby's perspective. First, the baby describes what is in the colorful photograph on the opposite page. "On Monday, I fell asleep in my swing. When I woke up, I saw a bright tower. Where was I?" The next page shows the baby in the playroom watching a sibling build a tower. The simple game encourages young readers to observe and explore their environment. Including the baby in daily routines presents a positive role model of family life. The photographs by Michael J.N. Bowles capture the precious moments of family life with a new baby. The other titles in the series are In China and At the Synagogue. These books will appeal to a variety of young children as he/she reads the photographs and/or text for the clues. The series will be most useful to parents, parenting professionals and libraries that serve preschool children.

Maria Salvadore
Children’s Literature Specialist, Washington, DC

What's really exciting about this line of books is that children from every background can relate to them. Platypus Media books have captured the values of close-knit families from many different perspectives.

John R. Pfeiffer
Capitol Hill Cluster Schools, Washington DC

Zack in the Middle
This is a true story about a boy in our school. We love having him celebrated in print. We knew him first as the baby brother then as the big brother and now as the proud fourth grader with his own biography in our easy reader section. Boys love this true story. Thank you, Dia.

Catherine Taylor
Fifth Grade Science Teacher Stuart Hobson Middle School, Washington, DC

If My Mom Were A Platypus fits perfectly into our 5th grade Animals curriculum. The students greeted the book like eager beavers - devouring each chapter and delving right into the next one. In class after class, they read beyond the required reading, propelled by excitement over what they were learning. The Activity Guide is chock-full of ways to explore the text, but the book is so full of fascinating facts, I was hardly wanting for ideas. What the kids really loved was writing up quiz questions they learned from the book, then testing each other on their newfound knowledge.
This book is a natural for elementary and middle school science classes!

Rochelle Testa
Special Education Teacher, White Oak Middle School

If My Mom Were A Platypus
The book is both delightful and informative. However, from the perspective of a special education teacher it is a useful teaching tool. The consistent organization of the book lends itself to various extension activities that need to be reinforced at the middle school level. Students would be able to chart/graph information on each of the animals. The short paragraphs are not only approachable for the lower reader, they lend themselves to skimming activities.

The book's arrangement is similar to a textbook, with chapters and headings that are repeated throughout. This arrangement, coupled with the fictional-type writing is yet another bridge to using a textbook for information. The book could be used to compare the organization of a science text to a fictional book.