The Skies Above My Eyes
This large book folds out so that all the pages in the book make one big long piece of paper. While that is a cool way to design this book, it’s hard to read it that way, so I read this book accordion-style which is how this book is folded to fit nicely inside the cover pages. I then, stretched the huge page out to fully grasp the whole concept of this monster-sized page.
This book is a journey into the sky above our heads. There is writing and colorful illustrations on both sides of the cardstock paper which covers everything from skyscrapers, clouds, birds, planets, astronauts, and the different layers of the atmosphere.
The two pages are different somewhat. They both start off by showing you things that you can see right above your eyes, at the bottom of the page. As you look up the page, it’s like looking up into the sky. The book places items according to how many miles above Earth they occur and in which atmosphere they occur.
Looking further up on one of the pages, you see items in the Stratosphere, the Mesosphere, the Thermosphere, and then we cross over the imaginary line that marks the beginning of space which, I didn’t even know had a name! This is known as the Karman Line. Now the page is sectioned off only by how many miles above Earth they are, so the further you look up the page, the farther from Earth you are. At the very top of the page, you are out of the Solar System beyond Kuiper Belt.
On the other side of this huge pull-out page, again we start off by looking at the items right above our head but the increments above our head are not so vast. It’s a slower incline: 1 mile, 3 miles, and it take a bit of time to get to 9 miles. We only hit the Mesosphere and the Exosphere on this side of the pull-out because there are more illustrations and more information in these atmospheres.
I learned a few things as I read through this colorful book and I think kids will like the pull-out concept, although I wasn’t a big fan. I liked how the book was arranged and I really enjoyed the colorful illustrations. I liked how they didn’t get crazy with the font in this book. They stayed with black and white and they used large enough fonts so you could read it as you enjoyed the illustrations. This is a fun, educational book that I feel kids will love to look at and read.
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