Ivy & Bean Break the Fossil Record

Annie Barrows's Ivy and Bean Break the Fossil Record is a funny school story for 7 year olds about two girls who decide to dig up a dinosaur.

What happens

It starts with Bean being bored. Properly, painfully bored, during silent reading, with a library book about cats in which every cat looks the same.

Her teacher swaps it for The Amazing Book of World Records, and within one playtime the whole class has gone mad. A man who eats thirty scorpions a day. A boy with 256 straws in his mouth. Somebody who hung fifteen spoons on his face with nothing but sweat holding them on.

Everyone picks a record. Zuzu is doing a hundred and eleven cartwheels. Emma has bagsied the spoons. Eric is going to eat five hundred sweets in a minute and has worked out that the trick is not chewing.

Bean has nothing, and it's eating her. Then Ivy looks up from her own book and tells her about Mary Anning, who found the first whole ichthyosaur at twelve, dug it out of a cliff herself and was laughed at the entire time.

So. A dinosaur. How hard can it be?

What's so good about these two is how differently they work. Ivy reads things and then knows them. Bean does things and then finds out. Between them they get much further than either would on her own, and a good deal deeper into trouble.

Bean's go at the straw record is worth the whole book. Ivy shoves one in too hard, Bean chokes, straws spray across the kitchen floor, and Bean sits there thinking about Mary Anning, decides she isn't a quitter either, and starts picking them up.

It's American, and it's second grade rather than Year Three, but seven-year-olds sail straight past that. Short chapters, and a reading level that a child who has just got confident can manage on her own.

What to read next

If your reader takes to them, the very first Ivy and Bean book is in the library. That's the one where they meet. Bean has already decided Ivy is boring and is quite rude about it, right up to the moment she badly needs somewhere to hide.