Science, that one subject I dread in my planning of homeschool lessons. My kids love it, I dread it and we never really find a neutral ground about it. Well, that was until we found Science Stumpers from Missing Piece Press!

The way this book works, you are presented with a stumper. You have the information you need, but you need to figure out why it is happening. You end the stumper with a question you need to try and figure out. Once you think you have the answer, you flip the page to find the details. These are broken down into three parts. First, you have the simple here it is answer. Next, you start giving a little more information into the here is your answer. Finally, you have the scientific explanation and description of the answer.

Giving the answers in this way allows you to use this same book for multiple grades. For my Preschool and first-grade daughters, I would only cover answer one, the most general answer. Now my third-grade son would have more questions, so we would go through the second explanation. Finally, my high school son is learning a lot of this in his courses, so we would go all the way to the full explanation of the stumper.

There are a few ways to use this book, if you wanted to try and stump people, you could read the mystery and see who would be able to provide the right answer. You could even award points for the right answer. This can be done in the classroom, among friends or right in your own living room. My third-grade son loved to do this with me and dad. He would read the mystery and make us solve it! The first few were easy, but they got harder!

Another way to use this book is as a break from your normal science lessons. We loved having this option and the kids would opt for this as often as I would let them. They would simply read the mystery, ponder it for a few moments and turn the page to find the answer. After this, I was often hit with the “mom did you know” comments, and I was able to sit back and smile hearing my kids teach me science!

Everyone in the house loves this book. This book will be a book that gets some use put into it. It is so full of learning and fun, and just saying those two things in the same sentence should tell you this is a book you need also!

—Product review by Amanda Hopkins, The Old Schoolhouse® Magazine, LLC, November, 2017