Customer Reviews

Watching Desert Wildlife (Younger Reader)

5 star:		(2)
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We were absorbed by the beautiful life like illustrations. Good information. We bought an extra for a birthday gift.

Like all of Jim Arnosky's books, the illustrations in this book are outstanding. They are very realistic, vivid, and engaging, but also add a lot to the text. There are illustrations of some of the birds and snakes and lizards that are made to be life-sized, which makes visualization much easier! Different species of snakes, birds, etc are placed side-by-side to make comparisons easy. We see close-up illustrations of features like a pit vipers heat-sensing pits, and the differing beaks of different types of birds. Wonderful!

The text is also very interesting, but here I would want to add a caveat. The age range given for this book is ages 6-12. I think 6-year-olds will enjoy the illustrations and can grasp much of the text, but they definitely need a grown-up explaining some complex words like uninhibited, venomous, buff-colored, instinctively, clamps, unmolested, etc. Don't get me wrong! I think it's wonderful for children of this age to be exposed to words like this, but they will need some of it clarified a bit. If you want a more straight-forward read-aloud, you'd want to wait a year or two longer, and for independent reading, they should probably be reading on a 5th grade level or higher.

With that said, my 8-year-old and 6-year-old both enjoyed this book and learned a lot from it, and as part of our schooling, I will read through it again in a couple years. I would highly recommend this book to those with elementary or middle-school aged children. With outstanding illustrations and informative text, this book provides a good overview of desert wildlife.