What is Energy

About the Book

In prehistoric Firestone Valley, young inventor Kaia notices that a still boulder high on a hill holds potential energy, and that it bursts into kinetic energy once pushed. As the boulder crashes into a tree, she sees energy appear as light, heat, and sound. Later, eating a sun-grown melon helps her realize food energy becomes motion, and she gathers her tribe to explain that energy never disappears—it only transforms and flows from the sun through living things.

Prerequisite Requirements

No formal preparation is needed. A young reader benefits from having seen things roll, burn, or grow, and from following a simple story about a character's discovery.

Learning Benefits

This book gives children words for invisible forces they already see—stored energy in a high boulder, motion energy in a rolling rock, and heat, light, and sound from a fire. It also offers a first conservation idea: energy changes form instead of vanishing. The story invites shared wondering about food, sunlight, and where energy goes.

Structured Knowledge Path

This is an early stepping stone in physics, placing energy at the center of how the world changes. It connects to later topics like work, heat transfer, electricity, and motion, and it links physical science to biology by tracing energy from the sun through food chains.

Advancement

Later learning can make these ideas measurable with joules and calories, explore how energy moves as heat or electricity, and use Newton's laws to explain why objects speed up and slow down. The habit of asking 'where did the energy go?' transfers to thinking about machines, fuel, and everyday technology.

Knowledge Points

• An object resting high up stores potential energy, and the higher it is, the more it stores.
• Once the boulder moves, stored potential energy becomes kinetic energy, the energy of motion.
• Moving energy can appear as light, heat, and sound at the same time.
• Energy from food becomes muscle power, so the sun's energy travels through what we eat.
• Energy cannot be created or destroyed; it only changes form.
• Energy flows continuously from the sun through leaves and animals to people.

Skills

• recognize-acceleration-as-change-in-velocity
• understand-basic-motion-vocabulary

Vocabulary

Energy

The ability to do work or cause change; the power that makes things move.

Potential Energy

Stored energy that has the potential to do work; energy waiting to be released.

Kinetic Energy

The energy of motion; the energy an object has when it is moving.

Conservation of Energy

The principle that energy cannot be created or destroyed, only changed from one form to another.

Joule

The unit of measurement for energy in the International System of Units (SI).

Calorie

A unit of energy often used to measure the energy content in food.

Reading Guidance for Teachers and Guardians

• Page 4: Pause at the still boulder and ask what might be 'waiting' inside it before anything moves.
• Page 5: Notice how the boulder speeds up as it rolls, and wonder together what changes when something starts moving.
• Page 7: After Kaia eats the melon, trace the path from sunlight to food to muscle power.
• Page 8: Ask where the boulder's motion went after it crashed, and listen for the idea that energy only changes form.
• Page 9: Follow the sun's energy through leaves, mammoths, and the tribe as a continuous flow.