Is a Blue Whale the Biggest Thing There Is? (Robert E. Wells Science) [Paperback]

Robert E. Wells (Author, Illustrator)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1, 1993 | Grade Level: 1 and up | Series: Robert E. Wells Science

The blue whale is the biggest creature on Earth. But a hollow Mount Everest could hold billions of whales! And though Mount Everest is enormous, it is pretty small compared to the Earth. This book is an innovative exploration of size and proportion.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This raffish primer on the meaning of "big" delivers a healthy, age-appropriate jolt to common assumptions about proportion and numbers. Beginning with a blue whale's flukes ("the 'flipper' parts of the tail, all by themselves bigger than most of Earth's creatures"), Wells projects the relative sizes of Mount Everest (20 giant jars filled with 100 blue whales each), the earth, the un, the Milky Way, right out to the universe itself. Child-friendly watercolors show a bag of 100 planet earths dwarfed by the sun, and a crate of 100 "sun-sized oranges" inconsequential atop Antares, "a red supergiant star." Somewhat understandably, Wells's pictures and analogies wither as he tackles the magnitude of galaxies and the universe. To prevent readers from choking on these perceptual mouthfuls, valuable introductory and final notes suggest a relatively concrete scale: for instance, counting to a thousand takes about 12 minutes, counting to a million takes 3 weeks at 10 hours per day, but counting to a billion takes a lifetime. Ages 6-11.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From School Library Journal

Grade 2-3-With its bright primary colors; cartoon illustrations; and readable, conversational text, this picture book will find a niche in most collections. Not a story as such, it begins on the title page with the question, "Is a Blue Whale the Biggest Thing There Is?" and answers it in a series of cumulative examples. Millions of blue whales placed into enormous jars and stacked up don't begin to compare to the colossal size of Mt. Everest, just as even 100 Mt. Everests piled up only make up a whisker on the face of the Earth. Taking this comparison to the outer limits of the imagination, Wells ends up with the biggest thing there is-the universe. Librarians and teachers could use this book to introduce units on size, measuring, or relativity. And it would be useful to demonstrate how to make beginning graphs in a fun, accessible way.
Jan Shephard Ross, Dixie Elementary Magnet School, Lexington, KY
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 32 pages
• Publisher: Albert Whitman & Company (January 1, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0807536563
• ISBN-13: 978-0807536568
• Product Dimensions: 7 x 10.5 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #309,602 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A clear winner of the Darryl Award, September 29, 2001

By 

Darryl Nightingale - See all my reviews

This review is from: Is a Blue Whale the Biggest Thing There Is? (Robert E. Wells Science) (Paperback)

Fantastic book, despite the nit-picking in one of the editorial reviews above.

This book really helps little kids come to grips with the idea of relative size. My preschool and kindergarten ESL students will founder when asked to understand/believe that a little patch of color on a globe is their country (Taiwan). Heck, kids this age don't even have much idea what a country is, let alone how big it is in relation to anything else. But this book sure set some lightbulbs to poppin' over kid's heads! That's how I measure the success of my classes and the materials I use in them, and by that measure, this book is a clear winner of the Darryl Award for Excellence in Children's Literature in the Field of Science and Mathematics!

The perfect book to partner with this book is the excellent Big Blue Whale by Nicola Davies (see my review of it). The focus Ms. Davies book is the whale itself. I found that using Ms. Davies' book before Mr. Wells' worked very well indeed.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great picture book for science and math integration, May 22, 2004

By 

Brooke (WV United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Is a Blue Whale the Biggest Thing There Is? (Robert E. Wells Science) (Paperback)

This is one of my favorite books. Every class I've ever used it with, from 1st grade up to 5th, has been fascinated. The illustrations are eye catching and perfectly correspond to the text. Literature should be intergrated across the curriculum. This book can help introduce lessons on big numbers and place value. It can also be used to tie into science lessons, with the size of the solar system or animal species. All elementary classrooms should have a copy of this book. It is both educational and interesting.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great teaching tool, March 15, 2007

By 

RFN (NYC) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Is a Blue Whale the Biggest Thing There Is? (Robert E. Wells Science) (Paperback)

I have used this book with several grade levels effectively. I originally purchased the book to give my third grade social studies class in an inner city New York school a concept of how high Mt. Everest is when they were studying China. They became so fascinated that we postponed the Himalaya lesson and ended up reading to the end of the book. They loved it! There are so many ways this book can be used with a classroom. It's a great way to involve children in the concept of estimating and they really get into guessing "how many" or trying to predict the very biggest thing there is. School age children enjoy the challenge of seeing how long it takes to count to 100 and then guessing how long it might take to reach a larger number. The children began asking "how long" to count to millions and billions if you counted 24 hours a day, creating a teachable moment when I helped them use math skills to discover the answer, which led to a discussion about setting up counting 'tag teams', if counting that long was feasible...the educational oportunities are endless, especially if you let the children's curiosity and creative thinking lead the lesson. All this was just from the first page of the book! I plan to purchase more books by this author in the hope they are equally thought-provoking.