Tad Carpenter

Every odd page of this delightful flip book gives a brief description of an animal and its appearance and behavior or habitat. On the opposing even page, there is a flap which shows an almost entirely hidden drawing of that animal. When you open the flap, the animal and its name are revealed. This is a board book which I read aloud to my students. Because we had already begun our unit about polar animals, they were familiar with all of the animals in this book and were able to guess who was "hiding" behind each flap. The reindeer tripped them up, they called caribou, but that just opened up a great discussion about the similarities and differences of the two hoofed, antlered animals. And, I was SOOOOOOO impressed with my kindergartners, because on the final page, AFTER we had met the polar bear, there is a penguin-ish bird. Of course penguins don't live in the arctic, and several of them caught the author's mistake, having assumed it was a penguin. It may have been better if it is indeed a bird of the north, to introduce it in the book to explain that it is not a penguin, or to leave it out. But that is a very small, small, critique of an excellent, fun, engaging non-fiction book about animals that live in the cold.… (mehr)