Goodreads Review:
You Are Stardust begins by introducing the idea that every tiny atom in our bodies came from a star that exploded long before we were born. From its opening pages, the book suggests that we are intimately connected to the natural world; it compares the way we learn to speak to the way baby birds learn to sing, and the growth of human bodies to the growth of forests. Award-winning author Elin Kelsey — along with a number of concerned parents and educators around the world — believes children are losing touch with nature. This innovative picture book aims to reintroduce children to their innate relationship with the world around them by sharing many of the surprising ways that we are all connected to the natural world.

Grounded in current science, this extraordinary picture book provides opportunities for children to use their imaginations and wonder about some big ideas. Soyeon Kim’s incredible diorama art enhances the poetic text, and her creative process is explored in full on the reverse side of the book’s jacket, which features comments from the artist. Young readers will want to pore over each page of this book, exploring the detailed artwork and pondering the message of the text, excited to find out just how connected to the Earth they really are.

"You are stardust.
Every tiny atom in your body came from a star that exploded long before you were born."

Miraculous though it may seem, the poetic text in this beautiful story is all science-based; an author's note is included at the end.

"Each time you blow a kiss to the world, you spread pollen that might grow to be a new plant."

The art, too, is extraordinary: Kim uses real-world materials, fine sketching, and painting techniques to make 3D pieces.

www.owlkidsbooks.com/stardust

See also: World So Wide by Alison McGee, Here and Now by Julia Denos, Your Place in the Universe by Jason Chin, Water is Water by Miranda Paul ( )

I really liked this book by Elin Kelsey. It introduces the idea of atoms and matter in a really beautiful and relatable way. The story explains how every atom came from a star that exploded and it details how we are connected to the natural word in an intimate way. I am teaching 5th grade this year so I think I would tie this book to the NGSS standard about Matter and Its Interactions that asks students to develop a model to describe that matter is made up of particles too small to be seen.

The book “You are Stardust” by Elin Kelsey didn’t impress me as much as I was expecting it to. Don’t get me wrong, the author had a lot of interesting facts throughout that were really cool to read such as one page where she says “You sneeze with the force of a tornado. Wind rockets from your nose quicker than a cheetah sprints.” This book had a hard time keeping my focus. The illustrations were not bad by any means, but for such large and interesting facts, I expected the pictures to catch my eye a little more. A lot of the pictures seemed very ‘blocky” and were sometimes hard to figure out what they were supposed to be of. I think the main point of this book was to give facts to children about how they came to be and how we are all connected to different animals in different ways, but I don’t think I would use this book in my classroom. ( )

This fact book was absolutely amazing! You Are Stardust begins by introducing the idea that every tiny atom in our bodies came from a star that exploded long before we were born. The beauty of this book is that it simplifies it so that a elementary age child can read about how we are all formed from stardust and not be confused or lost. The illustrations are astounding and magnificent. The illustrations cover the entire page and draw the readers eye to them. I noticed that the illustrations seemed to be very graphic design like and not clean cut and correct. They were very abstract. This extraordinary picture book provides opportunities for children to use their imaginations and wonder about some big ideas, in simple terms. ( )