Monday, January 9, 2012

Nonfiction Monday -- Emperor Penguin


Brrrrr.  It's cold outside.
News Flash -- it's wintertime; it's supposed to be cold outside. (but has been strangely warm lately)
Therefore it's now time to examine books like those in the series: A Day in the Life: Polar Animals.

Emperor Penguin by Katie Marsico. (illustrated with photographs) Chicago, IL: Heinemann Library, 2012.  Available now.
Oh, I hadn't known that Capstone bought up Heinemann - Raintree.  How about that?

Hmmm, maybe this book would be better to read in the summer.  Each page not only has photographs of the snow in Antarctica, but snowflake designs on a pale blue frosty (cold) background.

Suitable for first graders, this book has two sentences per page below the photo illustration. Each sentence has the standard Subject/ verb/ predicate arrangement.  The book ends with the longest sentence of the book: "Then young emperor penguins leave their parents to explore the snow world around them!" which will probably inspire young naturalists to want to find out more.

This series doesn't vary the placement of the photographs; it's the same on every page -- Picture above and two sentences below. There are some excellent underwater photographs of a flock of penguins swimming plus a closeup of their major food -- Krill -- which will interest young naturalists.

The last page contains an Index, two books for further reading, and two websites.  One is the National Geographic website. Although it doesn't list videos (okay, now they are DVDs), there are also a good many DVDs teachers and parents could borrow from their local library for further exploration of this cold weather bird.

Other books in this series include:
Arctic Fox
Leopard Seal (hmm, they eat penguins)
Narwhal
Polar Bear
Reindeer

For links to more great reviews of nonfiction books, go check out this blog:
Great Kid Books.

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