The Pebble in My Pocket: A History of Our Earth

by Meredith Hooper, Chris Coady (Illustrator)

Overview

New in paperback! Where do pebbles come from? How were they made? This book tells the story of a pebble, from its origins in a fiery volcano 480 million years ago to a busy, modern landscape. Readers follow the processes of rock formation and erosion that create new pebbles all over the world.

"Hooper and Coady pass on a sense of wonder for the history contained in one small pebble....Coady provides spectacular paintings, given texture, weight, and movement by the strokes of his brush." - Kirkus Reviews

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781847807687
Publisher:	Frances Lincoln Children's Books
Publication date:	10/09/2015
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	40
Sales rank:	135,587
Product dimensions:	8.65(w) x 10.75(h) x 0.40(d)
Lexile:	770L (what's this?)
Age Range:	7 - 10 Years

About the Author

Chris Coady trained in Illustration at Manchester Polytechnic. A freelance illustrator of children's books, he has also worked for design groups in Manchester and London.

Meredith Hooper was born in Australia. An Antarctic specialist, she has made several research trips to the continent. In 2000 she was awarded the Antarctica Medal by the US Congress. Her books for Frances Lincoln include The Pebble in my Pocket, which is the only children's book ever to be shortlisted for the Dingle History of Science Book Award.

Editorial Reviews

Gr 2-4-A child muses about the long history of a pebble, from its volcanic origins when the Earth was young to the day she picks it up off the ground. The conceit doesn't quite work, as the narrator sounds like an adult lecturer-"Two great landmasses, like giant plates, are colliding...It is 395 million years ago."-but the idea of using some common object or artifact as a springboard to the past is a tried-and-true one. Coady places an array of familiar, dramatically rendered dinosaurs and other flora and fauna in landscapes characteristic of each passing era. A timeline at the end includes labels for animals not previously named. More conventionally scientific than George Ella Lyon's Who Came Down That Road? (Orchard, 1992), this title makes an appealing alternative or replacement for Bruce Hiscock's The Big Rock (Atheneum, 1988).-John Peters, New York Public Library

School Library Journal

Hooper and Coady pass on a sense of wonder for the history contained in one small pebble in an outstanding picture-book overview of 480 million years.

The narrator, a young girl, holds a small pebble up and asks a simple question: "Where did you come from, pebble?" The book flashes back to the "beginning" of earth history, a dramatic spread of red hot volcanoes on the earth's crust spewing forth fire and rocks. One page and 85 million years later, the earth's surface is beginning to rise and buckle, rain and snow cause cracks in the rocks, and the first living things appear on the land. Seas rise and fall, fish give way to giant amphibians, amphibians give way to dinosaurs, then furry rodents, mammoths, early man, saber-toothed tigers, farms, houses, and modern times. The text never loses track of the pebble, worn smooth by rain and wind, packed into a new layer of rock forming under the sea, pushed up into mountains as the earth tilts and folds, and carried by glaciers to the field where the girl finds it. The final page offers a chronology with charts. A note makes clear that species are not drawn to scale, and other licenses taken. Coady provides spectacular paintings, given texture, weight, and movement by the strokes of his brush.

Kirkus Reviews