Elizabeth Shreeve’s children’s book Out of the Blue: How Animals Evolved from Prehistoric Seas bravely tackles an often-avoided topic by elementary school teachers—evolution. Ambitiously, it covers not only all of geological time in its 32 pages but also major evolutionary speciation events, major extinction events, and even how humans evolved from tetrapods. While two of my favorite groups of organisms (Platyhelminthes and Nematoda, the flatworms and roundworms) didn’t make the cut, every other major animal group is addressed at some point in this period-leaping chronicle.
Throughout the book, Shreeve weaves the tale of animal evolution both in water and on land into a cohesive story appropriate for K–5 elementary students; however, according to the author, it specifically targets the Next Generation Science Standards three-dimensional grade bands of grades 3–5. Shreeve even starts her tale with an anchoring phenomenon and driving question about the evolutionary relatedness of three organisms: hippos, dolphins,...
University of California Press