As a homeschool mom who loves the ocean, I was SO excited to receive the early copy of this! My son is aged 6 and we are constantly learning about the many creatures of the ocean and I am thrilled to utilize this to create an ocean themed unit this spring!

Thank you NetGalley for this wonderful ARC. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

This book is an informative book for kids teaching them the biology of the ocean. There are hands on projects that teach kids about the ocean.

The illustrations are beautiful and draw a child’s eye to the page. The instructions are clear and easy to follow although they really need an adult to assist with

I really like this one example on Page 69 about the survivability of turtle hatchlings. I did this one with my 8 year daughter and she understood how difficult it was for turtles to reproduce. She even said “wow, all those baby turtles really don’t make it?” It was an eye opening activity for her.

I suggest this book for children interested in biology or the ocean.

Six chapters, split into twenty lessons – and all the lessons have a page or so of science for us, followed by an experiment we can safely can do at home (or certainly with supervision we can) to prove their point. So we thicken water with different food colourings to see the sunlight levels at different sea depths, sacrifice a couple of sweets to see how salt might be similarly dissolved, and so much more – and that's only for the first chapter, regarding the 'anatomy' of the sea (a clue to the title of this the first time it came out, in 2021).

Next up it's how buoyancy in fishes works, how jellyfish stun their prey with their venomous attacking cells, and even designing a shark. We go from there through different diverse environments of the aquatic world, and various other creatures along the way, before checking out whether vegetable shortening could keep us warm the same an Arctic critter's blubber can.

Various elements of the book are all called an 'anatomy' of something, but that doesn't seem to hurt, and we get quite a few anatomical pictures of the various lifeforms in amongst the large spread of heavily-labelled diagrams. It's the experiments that are probably here as a USP, mind – some of them seem fairly prescriptive about what we can do, but they get us through the physics and chemistry safely, and add accuracy to our models. There is a lot to do here – including going elsewhere to find the answers to the many questions it poses for us, without answers.

This would keep a home-schooled child and parent really quite busy, and while not telling me perhaps as much as I might have expected to learn (despite the trivia about the dolphin being born with downy hair that lasts a whole week) it certainly packs a lot in. A strong four stars.