demoninho

There's a book written by a dutch author called "Kaas en Evolutie"(Cheese and Evolution) by Bas Haring. It was originally written as a popular scientific book aimed at adults but was marketed as a childrens book. It won several prizes for childrens litature in Holland and I read a norwegian an danish translation were underway, I didn't read the book myself and I don't know if there will be an english translation either.

scigirl

Hey Clutch,

Is there a museum in your area? Museum exhibits tend to explain things at a fairly simple level that kids can grasp. One thing you could do - if you have time and money sometime - is promise to take your daughter to the Pacific Science Center in Seattle. The whole place is fun and interactive - they have exhibits on the human body, genetics, physics, chemistry, and robotics. Plus you can stand by a really big model of DNA which is just cool.

http://www.pacsci.org/

scigirl

villainess

Not a kid's book, and not directly about genetics either, but a useful visual aid if you want to try and explain the inheritance-and-variation dance yourself would be some of the Peterson's Field Guides. They tend to lump the species in questions into taxonomic groups and then use little black arrows to point out the distinguishing characteristics, and if I recall correctly, the Eastern Birds one even has a few hybrids in it (the Lawrence's and Brewster's warblers, both crosses between Blue-winged and Golden-Winged warblers.)

When I was a kid, I learned rudimentary genetics from bull semen catalogues, but this is one of those advantages of being a farm kid that is hard to recapture. Although.... I suppose you could probably get some old bull semen catalogues from your friendly local agricultural college library, if you also feel like explaining artificial insemination and modern cattle husbandry to the wee one.

the.villainess

GunnerJ

Coragyps

My high school friend Billy Richburg's dad artificially inseminated cows for a living - they had a chest-type freezer full of liquid nitrogen and bull semen in the basement. And lots of long gloves, and odd little tubes....
Gunner, your "eek" face was just about right for all us 1962-model fourteen-year-olds.

pz

I'm in a farm community. There's a research station about a mile from my house -- I go over there every year to get some straws of bull semen for classes.

I also go on field trips to fertility clinics every summer (next one is in about two weeks). We get to peek in and do sperm counts and quality assessment. One of them also gives us free t-shirts -- my daughter was thrilled to get her happy sperm t-shirt to wear to school.

villainess

You don't have to get all that steamy to learn genetics from bull semen. The catalogues have very chaste pictures of the bulls, with their various genetic qualities listed under the pictures, a quick rundown on which are recessive, how the daughters they've had so far have turned out, and so forth.

Of course the part with the rubber gloves is also fun to know from a 'let's freak out the suburban kids' perspective.

the.villainess

BioBeing

I don't have this particular one on Evolution yet, but the Eyewitness series is very good. Geared towards 9-12 I think they say, but my 4 year old loves the Dinosaur one.