11 Experiments That Failed

Jenny Offill structures this picture book as a series of eleven real experiments a kid narrator actually tries, each laid out with the same mock-serious format real scientists use: a hypothesis, a list of what you need, what to do, and finally what happened, which is reliably some flavor of disaster. Can a washing machine wash dishes? Can a person eat only ketchup-covered snowballs all winter? The humor sits entirely in the deadpan delivery of results that go wrong in completely predictable ways. Schwartz & Wade's edition is a lean 41 pages, and the publisher lists it for ages 6 to 10.

What makes the format work as more than a joke book is that it's teaching the actual shape of the scientific method without ever saying that phrase out loud: hypothesis, materials, procedure, and results are all there, just applied to questions a kid would actually ask instead of a textbook example. The bigger idea underneath the laughs is that a failed experiment is still a real result, not a wasted one, which is a useful thing for a naturally curious kid to absorb early. Likely to send a kid off making up their own harebrained hypotheses to test, ideally ones a little less messy than a ketchup snowball.