Lesson 1a World Book Kids

I went to World of Animals and, lo and behold! there was a picture of an animal I actually know something about: the axolotl. I know of this Mexican salamander through a young microbiologist at the University of Minnesota. She is in a lab that is researching the axolotl's amazing ability to heal injuries with virtually no scar tissue. In fact, the axolotl's regenerative capacity is such that if you remove the poor thing's entire liver, it will keep itself alive while it grows a new liver. If we were to learn the secret of the axolotl's regenerative capacity, it seems that humans might truly be able to live forever, replacing each organ system with a new set as needed.

Setting that disturbing philosophical possibility aside, let's look at the information offered in World Book Kids. The picture is of an albino axolotl, but the article describes a normally colored axolotl. This is confusing. It's a great opportunity to mention albinos and what the term means, but they never do that. In fact, because axolotls are being so assiduously studied and it is easier to breed albino axolotls for studies, I believe there are more albino axolotls that normally colored axolotls on earth at any given moment. Surely this should be mentioned by World Book Kids.

I loved the "Exhibit" feature and will definitely show this to 6th grade classes doing animal research projects. The facts are clear, organized, and interesting (like that they share gender names with pigs: "boar" and "sow". How did that happen?) The article was mediocre at best. It didn't clear up the albino issue. It said they are popular pets but never explained why anyone would want to keep such an unattractive and apparently dull animal as a pet. What is it about axolotls that makes people want to domesticate them? Their importance in research was not mentioned nor, more importantly, was the regenerative capacity of salamanders in general.

I was surprised that the read-aloud feature was not very helpful. It is an automated voice which pronounces "axolotl" in awkward and inconsistent ways. Worse, if you press the "Hear text read aloud" link it reads every language it could read aloud in, and all the instructions. Students in the target age of "WB Kids" won't sit through for all this nonsense. More troubling, I can't find a way to stop Ms. Robotic Siri. As I write, she is dedicatedly reading the copyright and trademark information at the bottom of the page. I have clicked everywhere I can think of and cannot get her to stop.

When I logged in at South Middle School in Rapid City, the citations were not consistently organized: the APA and Harvard citations were spaced out vertically with one item per line. When I logged in at my house, the citations were lined up correctly. That seems odd.

But the bigger question is this: Why is Harvard citation formatting included in a resource aimed at K-5 in the first place? Are there elementary schools anywhere in the world that require Harvard citation formatting for elementary students? Here in Rapid City, we're being told if you can get middle school students to understand the legal requirements for citation, and to put the citation in MLA format, that's more than half the battle. Why can't those Massachusetts snoots just accept the MLA format? It' s got everything their format has except for the URLs which are impossibly long for students of World Book Kids age to transcribe anyway.

Nitpicking aside, I will definitely use the exhibit feature of this resource for 6th grade animal reports. The chart will make their work much easier and the MLA citation that they can just copy and paste to their bibliographies is icing on the cake.