Schools and libraries
Grade 3–4 text.
Grade 4–6 story.
That gap is the entire design. A reader who has stalled gets sentences they can decode carrying a problem they actually care about — and then nine more books.
Measured across all eighteen chapters of Book One: 23,689 words, 1,962 sentences. There is no Lexile on this page because nobody has measured one. A formula estimate presented as a measure is worse than no number, and a librarian notices.
Why it works for a reluctant reader
The profile is measured, not asserted.
Grade 3–4 text under a grade 4–6 story. Word-level decoding sits two years below the interest level, which is the whole point of a hi-lo book and is usually claimed rather than shown.
Nothing on the page is a wall.
Eighteen short chapters, each with its length assigned before it was written. At least three chapters in every volume run under 950 words, so a reader who needs a stopping place gets one.
The jargon a rope-and-rig book would be expected to carry is not there.
Ferrule, swage, siphon and integument appear zero times in eighteen chapters. The words that do arrive — ballast, lanyard, whipping, grapnel — are taught by the sentence they arrive in.
It is finishable, and then there are nine more.
A two-hour read that closes its own problem is a book a child who has never finished one can finish in a week. What a reluctant reader needs next is not a cliffhanger. It is another book.
The honest counterweight. The entry cost is names, not words. About twenty-three proper nouns land in the cold open and chapter one, against the project’s own budget of twelve, and that is where a struggling reader is most likely to bounce — inside the free sample below. Read it with the child before you buy thirty copies.
What the back matter is for
Two printed pages
at the back of every book.
Field Notes is one animal, a pronunciation, two evidence claims built to be checkable by a child, and the person who found them. It ends on What we made up — the page where the book names its own inventions and separates evidence from inference in front of the reader.
Make It is one build a volume out of household junk, in numbered steps, under thirty minutes, ending in a number the child writes down.
| Standard | What carries it |
|---|---|
| NGSS 3-LS4 | Fossils as evidence Field Notes is built for it: quill knobs on a catalogued forearm bone that a child could count if they were standing in front of it, and the mechanical-claw experiment on the difference between slicing and hooking. |
| NGSS 3-5-ETS1 | Engineering design, ten times One build per volume, with the materials list already in the book: the net-caster and its range card, the siphon, the balance beam, the moving roof, the one-pin release. |
| Measurement | A number the child writes down Every Make-It page ends with one. That is a range card, and Nell paints one on every rig in the Low Shop. |
| Civics | The jar-and-tin vote Two pots on the Long Table, a jam jar for go and a coffee tin for wait, tipped out and counted aloud twice in front of everybody, and the result written into the Ledger with a date. It is on the page, not in a sidebar. |
| Source literacy | What we made up The page that separates evidence from inference in front of the reader, and names the book’s own inventions. No dinosaur ever wore a hipseat and none of them ever picked out a kid. |
Class sets and purchase orders
Thirty copies of one volume
$8.09 a copy
Thirty paperbacks of a single title, printed together and shipped free inside the United States. $242.70 the set, against $269.70 bought singly.
Not on sale yet. Nothing here has cleared the publisher’s own gate: no volume has a typeset interior, a print wrap, or an ISBN in either format, and the ebook price has not been ruled. Every free page on this site is finished and true — the whole first chapter, ten Field Notes, ten builds — and the shop opens when the books do. Write to orders@dinoroost.com to be told when.
Need a different quantity, or several titles? Write to schools@dinoroost.com and a person answers.
Buying on a purchase order
Send the PO to schools@dinoroost.com and you get an invoice on net-30 terms, a W-9, a remit-to address, and tax-exemption handled before anything prints. A card is not required and a marketplace account is not required.
Free, and no email needed
The teacher’s notes for each volume — discussion questions, a writing prompt, the Make-It as a lab with a materials list, and the vocabulary — download without giving anybody an address. So does the whole first chapter.
In preparation. Write to the schools address and we will send what exists today rather than make you wait for the set.
Where the facts come from
Every claim on a Field Notes page traces to a source a named person opened: the paper that made the claim, or a catalogued specimen with the institution holding it. Encyclopedia sites, documentaries and search results are not sources of record here.
Being straight about the state of it: the citation file exists for every volume and the checked by column is not yet signed. Until it is, ask us for the citations and you will get the file as it stands rather than a claim it is finished.
The content note
What is and is not
on the page.
- No child dies on the page.
- No blood in detail.
- No swearing, and no romance.
- No hero kills a dinosaur.
- Nothing anybody builds is meant to hurt anyone.
- Peril yes, cruelty no — and three real laughs a book.
The hard rule that carries the theme. Kids build rigs — harness gear a dinosaur wears and helps operate. Rigs throw nets, sap, water, mud, sound, light, rope, smoke and flares. They never throw bullets, blades or fire, and no book explains that: every book demonstrates it.
Illustrations, exactly. Books One, Two and Three carry eighteen interior illustrations each, one per chapter. Books Four to Ten are text and cover. When the remaining volumes are illustrated, everyone who bought a paperback of them will be told.
How these books were made. The text and the illustrations were produced with generative AI under human direction. That line is printed on the copyright page of every volume, and it is here for the same reason: a school librarian should not have to ask. The full answer is here.