Common Critters
The Wildlife in Your Neighborhood
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Common Critters celebrates neighborhood wildlife in verse. A familiar cast of characters—worms, slugs, caterpillars, ladybugs, robins, mourning doves, houseflies, spiders, squirrels, skunks, and others—crawls, runs, buzzes, and flits through these lively poems, which show how exotic these seemingly ordinary creatures really are.
Dan Tavis’s humorous illustrations crank up the delight, and a child wanting to learn more will find it in the natural-history backmatter. Pat Brisson employs a variety of verse forms in the book, and she shows how it’s done in a back-of-book feature called “A Peek into the Poet’s Toolkit.”
Common Critters is a three-tool STEAM book with delightful reading, natural history, and language skills rolled into one.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Superlative back matter elevates this illustrated collection of jokey poems celebrating neighborhood wildlife: "There are creatures all around you,/ not exotic, but not tame./ Though most are pretty common,/ they're intriguing just the same." Each critter gets its own poem on a spread illustrated with Tavis's artful landscapes and goofily goggle-eyed wildlife. Brisson's wordplay ranges from obvious ha-has (of crows: "And could this fact be much absurder?/ A group of you is called a murder!") to sophisticated lines (of caterpillars: "It follows metamorphic urges/ to break out, and what emerges/ is a moth or butterfly/ that dries its wings and starts to fly"). A "Facts About Common Critters" section offers more information about the featured creatures ("A squirrel will crack open a nut and rub it on its face before burying it") alongside a brief discussion of artistic license, while "A Peek into the Poet's Toolkit" uses the poems to explain rhyme, meter, stanza, and poetic license. Ages 6 8.
