Let’s Mix Baking Soda and Vinegar

What Do Scientists Do All Day?
Written by Jane Wilsher & Illustrated by Maggie Li
Age Level: 4-8 Years
Published March 3, 2020

What do you want to be when you grow up?

Science was my worst and least favorite subject in school. My hypotheses were usually wrong, my experiments mostly failed, and because I was clumsy and accident-prone I spent a lot of time making sure I didn’t light myself on fire when using a Bunsen burner. But if I’d had this book as a kid and realized that science extended far beyond my school’s narrow curriculum, I would have been much more inclined to consider a career in a scientific field.

"Scientists ask big, small, and tricky questions about our world. They test out their ideas with experiments, which often go wrong before they go right. Then they study the results and discover how things work."

What Do Scientists Do All Day? presents 14 different scenes, and within each scene there are 8 different scientists hard at work. I love this approach because it shows how broad the field of science is by taking readers on a tour of places like a nature reserve, the Arctic research station, an energy plant, and the International Space Station. You can work with people, plants, animals, computers, machines, or even rocks. You can work indoors at a research lab, be outside studying nature, or help design and build a brand new city.

My kids pour over this book for big chunks of time just studying the pages and asking questions. The definitions for each scientist’s role are clear and easy to understand, and there’s a great index in the back so you can easily find the volcanologist or the fungi specialist. This book makes science incredibly inviting and appealing. Even to me, and you know that’s saying something.