Picture books and chapter books about the people who design and build our world, sorted by the eight careers in the Ribbonfield crew.
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Books about designing whole buildings and the people who dream them up. For kids like Ari.
Iggy builds towers out of anything, and when a bridge collapses on a class field trip, his building skills save the day.
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Young Frank and his grandfather, also an architect named Frank, visit a museum and discover that a building can be anything you imagine.
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The true story of the Black architect who led the design of the National Museum of African American History and Culture.
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How Zaha Hadid turned the curves of rivers, dunes and wind into buildings around the world.
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One of Pakistan's first women architects, who turned to designing low-cost, earth-friendly homes for families after disasters.
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Kids' block towers and sandcastles shown side by side with famous buildings they look like.
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A Pulitzer Prize-winning critic explains how buildings shape the way we feel and live. Great for high schoolers thinking about architecture school.
Get it at Bookshop (opens in a new tab)Books about bringing land, money and neighbors together to make something happen. For kids like Keya.
Marcy and her neighbors turn an empty, rubble-filled city lot into a garden the whole block shares.
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Uncle Jed saves for decades to open his own barbershop in the segregated South. A story about planning, patience and owning a place.
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Based on a true story: a girl and her neighbors turn gray walls into murals and change how their whole block feels.
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A tour of all kinds of homes, real and imagined, and the people and things inside them.
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Jack designs his dream house room by room, each one more inventive than the last.
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Two kids explore an empty house in the woods and imagine the people who lived in its rooms.
Get it at Bookshop (opens in a new tab)Books about light, from lighthouses to light bulbs. For kids like Lux.
A Caldecott Medal winner about a lighthouse keeper whose light guides ships through the dark.
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How light works: shadows, colors, reflections and why we can see at all.
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The inventor whose ideas brought electric light into homes and cities.
Get it at Bookshop (opens in a new tab)Books about parks, gardens and the trees that change a city. For kids like Hazel.
Liam tends a struggling garden on an old railway, and it slowly spreads across his gray city.
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Kate Sessions planted the trees that turned dusty San Diego into a green city full of parks.
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Wangari Maathai planted trees across Kenya, one seedling at a time, and won the Nobel Peace Prize.
Get it at Bookshop (opens in a new tab)Books about building, testing, failing and trying again. For kids like Cal.
Rosie builds gadgets from junk and learns that a flop is just the first step.
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A girl sets out to build something magnificent, gets frustrated, and keeps going until it works.
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The mathematicians and engineers, including Mary Jackson, NASA's first Black woman engineer, who helped send astronauts into space.
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A giant illustrated guide to how machines work, from levers and gears to lasers and Wi-Fi.
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Jerome collects words the way others collect stamps, then shares them with the world. Penn would approve: the right word matters.
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Lisa measures her dog Penny every way she can think of. A fun look at the careful measuring behind every building.
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The trucks on the construction site finish their work and settle down for the night.
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The simple, bright step-by-step story of a house going up, from digging to moving in.
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Meet the surveyors, carpenters, plumbers and electricians who turn a plan into a home.
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A family builds their own house by hand over more than a year, based on the author's childhood.
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A house built entirely by women in the building trades, from the framer to the electrician.
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Five friends learn how buildings stand up while they build a doghouse together.
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