The Best Volcano Books for Kids

Gail Gibbons takes a volcano apart from the crust up, then puts the lava, ash, vents, and cones back together in labeled pictures.

Jessie is near Mount St. Helens on May 18, 1980, when the mountain’s north side gives way and the forest becomes an escape route.

Ms. Frizzle follows a missing piece of the classroom globe to an underwater volcano that is busy making new land.

Ms. Frizzle takes the class to Hawaii, where their field trip heads toward the crater instead of the visitor center.

Surtsey rises out of the sea near Iceland, and scientists watch a bare volcanic island acquire its first insects and plants.

Pompeii disappears beneath Vesuvius in AD 79, then returns piece by piece when excavators begin digging centuries later.

A child tumbles into a crater during a field trip and discovers that the little lava creatures below are more curious than terrifying.

A Mexican farmer is plowing his cornfield when the ground splits, smokes, and begins growing into a volcano.

Big photographs and short chapters answer the urgent questions: what erupts, where it comes from, and how close anyone should stand.

Seven young scientists gather at Yellowstone and learn that their summer project is really an attempt to stop a supervolcano.

Maribel ignores the Mount St. Helens evacuation to retrieve something left behind, just as the ash begins to fall.

A chatty volcano explains its own magma, vents, eruptions, and many different shapes from the inside out.

A busy Roman town sits below Mount Vesuvius until ash buries it—and preserves clues that wait nearly two thousand years.

Jack and Annie arrive in Pompeii on its last day, looking for a lost story while Vesuvius begins to wake up.

Full-page photographs show eruptions, craters, lava fields, and the new landscapes volcanoes leave behind.