Curious Critters Volume 2 dazzles with crisp photos

As a child I went to our local nature center and now as a parent I take our two boys to our local several times a month.   To that point, if you’re ever in Greensboro, North Carolina the Greensboro Science Center is awesome and well worth your time.  Curious Critters Volume 2 takes a close up look at some of the critters that you’ll find featured at your local nature center in a way that’s educational and fun for children of all ages.  As a dad, and a photographer, I’m also drooling over the photography, which is vivid and has and depth of field that makes the details on the smallest creatures really stand out.

Author David FitzSimmons released Curious Critters a couple years ago.  I loved that book too.  Curious Critters II doesn’t deviate at all from the original formula and that’s a good thing.

Curious Critters Volume 2 takes a look at 18 animals in two different ways.   On a big page you’ll get an amazing close up of the animal.  The really big animals like the American Alligator get two pages so that you can really get a scope of their size.  The really cute animals like the Eastern Cottontail rabbit get two pages because there are four of them featured and four bunnies are so much cuter than one. The Gray Squirrel gets two pages also and it works for them because of their white color on the white background.   All of the other animals get one page and some text that briefly tells their story.

The text tells a little story about each critter.  Some of the stories are written as a poem while others are silly stories about how the animals live.  Bonus: the vocabulary isn’t basic, so young readers up to age 9 will most likely learn some new words.

The other way that Curious Critters takes a look at the animals happens in the back of the book.  On these two pages they have a smaller picture of each animal and more text about how the animals live.  In this area the words are more instructional and offer readers a chance to learn about the animals.  There is also an animal silhouette matching page after that which will allow kids to use their imagination and guessing abilities.

Curious Critters Volume 2 doesn’t have thick pages, so it’s not good for really young children to thumb through by themselves.  Other than that the book is perfect and will be enjoyed by all ages.