Are you shopping for any future inventors, scientists, artists, astronauts, mechanics, or overall STEAM fanatics during this holiday season? This week’s Holiday Gift Guide picks are just for you! Featuring everything from a zany young inventor and her endless determination to improve her creations, to an exciting new middle grade nonfiction read that’s perfect for lovers of all things that go. You’re sure to find the perfect title on this list to inspire your young brainiac’s next invention!
Izzy Gizmo
Written by Pip Jones
Illustrated by Sara Ogilvie
Izzy Gizmo’s inventions are marvelous, magnificent―and they often malfunction. But when she finds a crow with a broken wing, she just has to help! Izzy tries again and again to build a new pair of wings, but nothing is working. And that makes Izzy really cross! Can Izzy overcome her failures? Or is her friend destined to live as a crow who can’t fly?
This feisty tale of determination, ingenuity, and friendship is sure to capture the imaginations of aspiring young inventors.
Can’t get enough of Izzy and her inventions? Izzy Gizmo and the Invention Convention is coming Spring 2020!
Buy Izzy Gizmo through your local bookstore, Barnes & Noble, or on Amazon.
Nina Soni, Former Best Friend
Written by Kashmira Sheth
Illustrated by Jenn Kocsmiersky
Nina tried as hard as she could, but still somehow she forgot about her school project. Fortunately, a class lesson about Alexander Fleming suggests how she might make a great discovery—and thus a great project! But with little sister Kavita’s birthday party right around the corner, and her longtime friendship with Jay on the rocks, Nina has a lot to keep track of.
Readers are sure to relate to author Kashmira Sheth’s lovable and distractible Nina Soni and her slightly scatter-brained efforts to manage her life with lists, definitions, and real-life math problems.
Buy Nina Soni, Former Best Friend through your local bookstore, Barnes & Noble, or on Amazon.
Save the Crash-test Dummies
Written by Jennifer Swanson
Illustrated by TeMika Grooms
It’s hard to imagine a world without cars, but these incredibly important vehicles haven’t always been so safe to drive. If it weren’t for the experiments conducted over decades that involved all kinds of crash test volunteers—dead, alive, animal, or automated—cars as we know them might not be around. And then how would you get to school?
Filled with fun four‐wheeled nuggets of history and explanations of how cars actually work, this entertaining nonfiction book from former science educator and award-winning author Jennifer Swanson offers a front‐seat view of the science and engineering behind the world’s most important vehicle and will appeal to readers who are interested in getting in under the hood and seeing how things work.
Buy Save the Crash-test Dummies through your local bookstore, Barnes & Noble, or on Amazon.
Countdown
2979 Days to the Moon
Written by Suzanne Slade
Illustrated by Thomas Gonzalez
In 1961, President John F. Kennedy announced that the United States would try to land a man on the Moon by the end of the decade. During the two thousand, nine hundred and seventy-nine days that followed his speech, eighteen astronauts climbed into spaceships. Eight rockets soared into space. And four hundred thousand people―engineers, technicians, scientists, mathematicians, and machinists―joined Project Apollo in hopes of making the dream a reality.
Award-winning author and former mechanical engineer Suzanne Slade joins up with New York Times best-selling illustrator Thomas Gonzalez to tell the powerful story of the successes, failures, triumphs, tragedies, and lessons learned from Apollos 1 through 10 that led to the first Moon landing.
Buy Countdown through your local bookstore, Barnes & Noble, or on Amazon.