Website Review: Google Earth View

GOOGLE EARTH VIEW is a web-based project containing a collection of landscapes.

Users select from dozens of hotspots on the map to explore satellite images of landscapes from around the globe. In addition to zooming into the location, the project shows the colors on a spectrum.

Librarians will find this project to be a unique way to help art students explore color, shape, texture, and patterns. Team with math, geography, computer, and art teachers for an interdisciplinary project connecting these four disciplines.

To visit the website, go to https://goo.gl/ts3h7q.

Book Review: Extreme Planet

EXTREME PLANET by National Geographic Kids follows Carsten Peter’s adventures exploring intense environments around the world.

In each exciting chapter, author Carsten Peter explores a different amazing landscape including volcanoes, glaciers and ice sheets, deserts, caves, canyons, and other extreme places. The topics feature maps, diagrams, and full color photographs. In addition to an interesting narrative, each chapter also includes expert tips, notes from the field, necessary gear and gadgets, and sidebars containing related facts.

Activities are woven throughout the book. Youth learn to make a tornado in a bottle, use a topographical map, and grow stalactites. The book also includes a glossary, resources, activity ideas, and an index.

Librarians will find that youth enjoy following an explorer visiting exciting destinations around the work. Connect the book with nonfiction works focusing on the science of each destination such as volcanoes and caves.

Published by National Geographic Kids on October 13, 2015.