America at Work: Mining [Paperback]

Ann Love (Author), Jane Drake (Author), Pat Cupples (Illustrator)

Book Description

Age Level: 7 and up | Grade Level: 2 and up | Series: America at Work

This book from the America at Work series introduces young children to the people, machines and environmental concerns involved in the resource-based industry of mining. In Mining, kids explore an underground mine, a surface coal mine and an oil drilling site. Combining fact and fiction with colorful illustrations, the story delivers an early lesson in appreciating and protecting our natural resources.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Grade 2-4-In Mining, Trish and Jamie's upcoming hockey tournament prompts their parents to show them how the steel blades for ice skates are made. First they take a tour of mom's workplace, an underground mine shaft, and then of the steel mill where dad works. There, the children see how ore is changed into various usable metals, including stainless steel. The processes used to mine ore and fuels are discussed, as is what is being done to reclaim mining wastelands. In Fishing, Grandpa takes his granddaughter to his fish farm on the Maine coast. Readers learn about large trawlers that use underwater nets to catch fish as well as how they are hatched, grown, and sold. The girl then travels back to the West coast where her father, a fish and wildlife officer, describes his job and gives her a tour of nearby streams and rivers. Environmental issues such as overfishing are also discussed. While Drake and Love have chosen subjects and a format reminiscent of those by Gail Gibbons, the smaller text size, detailed explanations, and terminology in these two books are better suited to slightly older readers. The labeled pictures help younger children to follow along. These entries are colorful, descriptive, and detailed; the cheerful watercolor illustrations make otherwise dry subjects interesting.
Kit Vaughan, J. B. Watkins Elementary School, Midlothian, VA
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Kirkus Reviews

This America at Work entry features cartoon illustrations of a smiling family on a trip ``out east'' to a Junior Miners' hockey tournament. The mother works in a molybdenum mine, the father works in a steel mill, and parental offers to take their twins to work meet with great approval. Even readers unfamiliar with the series may surmise, rightly, that this is going to be a wordy ride through material that may or may not be useful in writing school reports. Cutaway charts intended to support the hackneyed premise do little to clarify the goings on in an underground mine; two miners in hard hats who are ``making the roof safe,'' for example, shore up a shaft with what appear to be automatic weapons with tiny flying buttresses set on the shaft's floor. The topic-driven trip includes visits to a steel mill, an airplane ride, an oil well, a toxic dump, a picnic in a park that was once a coal pit, and ends in a hockey arena, with the kids asking all the right questions to keep the facts flowing. They count things made from steel or oil in an ``interactivity'' befitting the automaton-like nature of progeny who actually let their mother get away with lecturing, ``At a smelter, the bits of molybdenum ore are heated and refined to form a powder of pure molybdenum.'' (index) (Picture book. 7-10) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 7 and up
  
• Paperback: 32 pages
• Publisher: Kids Can Press (August 1, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 155337424X
• ISBN-13: 978-1553374244
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 9.1 x 0.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,750,302 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #17 in Books > 4-for-3 Books > Business & Investing > Economics > Natural Resources

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