A lesser choice for beginning readers.
What do zoo animals eat?
Clear, colorful photographs accompany a very simple text to answer this question. This title, originally published as a picture-book paperback in 2000, has been simplified for its transition to the Step into Reading series. Using a very basic vocabulary, simple sentences and repetition, the text touches on food preparation and feeding for elephants, zebras, giraffes, a panda, pigs, tortoises, porcupines, tigers, alligators, a sea lion, polar bears, a macaw, a cockatoo and flamingos. Children feed snacks to goats and eat ice pops themselves. Many of the pictures are the same as in the earlier edition, but some have been reworked. A few new images emphasize the feeding connection: The hand holds a meatball for the tiger behind the bars; another hand feeds a banana to a porcupine. The animal portraits will give struggling readers pleasure, but the narrative, full of exclamation points and questions, will not. Where previously the tiger “struts into her yard and relaxes under a shady tree,” here “he naps in the sun.” This new version may offer practice in associating letter combinations with sounds, but it won’t convey any of the enjoyment that reading can offer. Animal feeding is much more exciting in the DK reader Feeding Time, by Lee Davis(2001), which describes animals in the wild and even includes a picture index.
A lesser choice for beginning readers. (Early reader. 5-7)Pub Date: July 22, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-385-37190-2
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
Hee haw.
The print version of a knee-slapping cumulative ditty.
In the song, Smith meets a donkey on the road. It is three-legged, and so a “wonky donkey” that, on further examination, has but one eye and so is a “winky wonky donkey” with a taste for country music and therefore a “honky-tonky winky wonky donkey,” and so on to a final characterization as a “spunky hanky-panky cranky stinky-dinky lanky honky-tonky winky wonky donkey.” A free musical recording (of this version, anyway—the author’s website hints at an adults-only version of the song) is available from the publisher and elsewhere online. Even though the book has no included soundtrack, the sly, high-spirited, eye patch–sporting donkey that grins, winks, farts, and clumps its way through the song on a prosthetic metal hoof in Cowley’s informal watercolors supplies comical visual flourishes for the silly wordplay. Look for ready guffaws from young audiences, whether read or sung, though those attuned to disability stereotypes may find themselves wincing instead or as well.
Hee haw. (Picture book. 5-7)Pub Date: May 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-545-26124-1
Page Count: 26
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A light dose of natural history, with occasional “EWWW!” for flavor
Having surveyed worms, spiders, flies, and head lice, Gravel continues her Disgusting Critters series with a quick hop through toad fact and fancy.
The facts are briefly presented in a hand-lettered–style typeface frequently interrupted by visually emphatic interjections (“TOXIN,” “PREY,” “EWWW!”). These are, as usual, paired to simply drawn cartoons with comments and punch lines in dialogue balloons. After casting glances at the common South American ancestor of frogs and toads, and at such exotic species as the Emei mustache toad (“Hey ladies!”), Gravel focuses on the common toad, Bufo bufo. Using feminine pronouns throughout, she describes diet and egg-laying, defense mechanisms, “warts,” development from tadpole to adult, and of course how toads shed and eat their skins. Noting that global warming and habitat destruction have rendered some species endangered or extinct, she closes with a plea and, harking back to those South American origins, an image of an outsized toad, arm in arm with a dark-skinned lad (in a track suit), waving goodbye: “Hasta la vista!”
A light dose of natural history, with occasional “EWWW!” for flavor . (Informational picture book. 5-7)Pub Date: July 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-77049-667-5
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Tundra Books
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2016
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