Ada Twist, Scientist:

Ada Twist, Scientist by Andrea Beaty, published by Harry N. Abrams on September 6, 2016, age range 5 - 7 years.

The latest in a collection of picture books about girls in various careers, Andrea Beaty's Ada Twist, Scientist is about a young girl who wants to be a scientist. I was originally drawn in by the illustrations, which are detailed and include additional words to explain what Ada is thinking or feeling, but was impressed by the overall story as well. It's a great story about questioning the world around you and the desire to learn.

At first Ada is silent, and it concerns her parents that she hasn't started speaking yet by the time she's three-years-old. But once she does start to talk Ada immediately begins to question why things work, how they work, when they started to work, where they work, and who makes them work. But in the end she always comes back to "why" because she "wanted to know what the world was about". Her parents encourage her to learn and discover the answers to her own questions, and this is where Ada's journey truly begins.

As the story continues we see Ada investigate her many questions, such as wondering why the funny smell of her dad's cabbage stew. Her process uses the scientific method, and she creates hypotheses as she explores the world around her while teaching children how the basics of science work. Beaty's use of rhyme and simple language helps the book be easily memorized by children and allows them to learn as Ada does.

Overall this is a great book for many reasons. The rhyming language makes it a good read-aloud choice. The subject of science and the main character being a girl makes it an inspiring story for all children interested in the field, but especially for girls who are often not included in science books. While it can be read alone as a single book I would also recommend reading it in tandem with Beaty's other picture books. They all feature inspiring stories about children learning about various different careers and subjects, and children could benefit in different ways from reading them all.

The other books in this series are Iggy Peck, Architect and Rosie Revere, Engineer by Andrea Beaty. Another similar book is I Am Jane Goodall (from the Ordinary People Change the World series) by Brad Meltzer which is a biographical picture book about the famed scientist. There's also The Most Magnificent Thing by Ashley spires, which is about a young girl's journey of inventing something she's imagined, as well as What Do You Do With an Idea? by Kobi Yamada, which is about a child learning how their ideas can grow and change over time.

A possible activity to go along with this book would be to conduct some form of scienftic experiment with the children. Explain how what they're doing coincides with the scientific method that Ada uses in the book, and allow them to develop their own hypotheses to explore. A good writing exercise would also be to have the children come up with their own questions about the world that they want to investigate. Then maybe let them vote on which questions to answer through their experiments.