Steve Parker is a British science writer of children's and adult's books. He has written more than 300 titles and contributed to or edited another 150.
Born in Warrington, Lancashire, in 1952, Parker attended Strodes College, Egham and gained a BSc First Class Honours in Zoology at the University of Wales, Bangor. He worked as an exhibition scientist at the Natural History Museum, and as editor and managing editor at Dorling Kindersley Publishers, and commissioning editor at medical periodical GP, before becoming a freelance writer in the late 1980s. He is a Senior Scientific Fellow of the Zoological Society of London. Parker is based in Suffolk with his family.
Parker's writing career began with 10 early titles in Dorling Kindersley's multi-award-winning Eyewitness series, from the late 1980s to the late 1990s. He has since worked for more than a dozen children's book publishers and been shortlisted for, among others, the Rhone-Poulenc Science Book Prize, Times Educational Information Book of the Year, and Blue Peter Book Award.
"The Elements: The Building Blocks of the Universe" is an informative book all about the elements and the periodic table. One of my favorite things about this book was that it wasn't your typical boring science book that gave the definition and a tiny picture of an element, it had many different pages to describe what the elements were, for example, it had a page devoted to radioactive elements and it had tons of different pictures, graphics with the texts, and colors to make it more interesting for kids. There were several pages in this book that were also devoted to certain elements alone such as calcium, gold, hydrogen, and carbon, all these pages also had lots of images and different graphics with the text to make it stand out more. I would say that the genre for this book would be informational because it provides lots of facts about the topics of elements and lots of facts on specific elements themselves. I would say that this book would be best for fifth or sixth graders because this is about the age where they begin to learn about certain elements in their classrooms.
While looking through this book I was thinking about all the different options of fiction books I could tie with this because there are so many elements, so I chose the book "The Big Red Balloon". In this book, a class is celebrating their one hundredth day of school and they are sending big balloons in the sky to see where they go, in order to get a big balloon to fly we must use of the elements from the periodic table, we must use helium. With the help of helium getting put into the balloon, the balloon will have the ability to sore through the air until it runs out of helium and lands somewhere else. The reason why I chose this book to tie with my nonfiction book is because my nonfiction book is all about the elements and my fiction book breaks it down into one element, it shows the importance of helium.
Elements never looked so good as photographed in this book! On pages 68-69, bismuth looks like something out of The Transformers, while the silvery-gray crystals of galena, the main ore of lead, are astonishingly beautiful. More than just good looks, the text features fascinating facts to spark further research.
Chemistry is a fact- filled book about chemistry of crouse. The book talks about chemistry formations, chemicals , I chose this book because of the fun facts and entertaining characters on each page. I would recommend this book to anyone who loves science .