The Insecto-files

by Helaine Becker, Claudia Davila (Illustrator)

Most experts believe there are over 10 quintillion (10,000,000,000,000,000,000) individual insects digging, boring, flying, crawling, and excreting their way in and around the Earth. That’s about a billion billion bugs for every single person. And that’s not even counting their close relatives, the arachnids, which include spiders, lice, ticks, scorpions, and mites. So, if we humans really are that outnumbered, wouldn’t it be a good idea to learn a little more about our insect overlords? Helaine Becker’s latest activities guide does just that. Following the same format as her critically acclaimed Science on the Loose, which demystified science through fun and silly experiments, The Insecto-Files investigates the hidden lives of insects. It blends little-known facts about bugs with a wealth of easy-to-do activities that are as entertaining as they are educational. Packed with Becker’s trademark blend of energy, irreverence, and information, The Insecto-Files offers budding entomologists a gleeful guerilla approach to learning about the wonderful world of bugs.

64 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2009

About the author

Helaine Becker has written over 70 books, including the #1 National bestseller, A Porcupine in a Pine Tree,and its sequel, Dashing through the Snow, Sloth at the Zoom, Dirk Daring, Secret Agent, the Looney Bay All-Stars chapter book series, non-fiction including Counting on Katherine, Worms for Breakfast and Zoobots (all Junior Library Guild Selections), Monster Science, You Can Read, Lines Bars and Circles, and Boredom Blasters, plus many picture books and young adult novels. She also writes for children’s magazines and for children's television. Her show Dr. Greenie's Mad Lab was a finalist at MIP.com Junior in Cannes.
She has won the Lane Anderson Award for Science Writing for Children twice,once for The Big Green Book of the Big Blue Sea and once for The Insecto-Files, and the Picture Book of the Year Award from the Canadian Booksellers Association for A Porcupine in a Pine Tree. She has also won three Silver Birch awards and a Red Cedar award.

Helaine Becker holds U.S. and Canadian citizenship. She attended high school in New York, university in North Carolina (Go Blue Devils!!!!) and now lives in Toronto with her husband and dog, Ella. She has two really handsome sons.

Reviews

[Jo-Ann]

cool experiments/activity
Scratch me a tune page 22
page 23 cricket's chirp in 8 secs + 3 + temperature