Our family has lots of non-fiction books on animals, nature, and science in the house. A reference book is a great thing to have around because you never know when school-age children will need something in it. Granted there is that whole internet thing, but a book allows for that random sense of discovery that online searching simply doesn’t satisfy. However, odds are that all of, or almost all of your non-fiction animal reference books are encyclopedic, or listing in the presentation. That certainly leads to discover and learn about new creatures, but might not motivate kids to read it page to page. What Breathes Through Its Butt? is a non-fiction book on animals, but it’s unlike any critter book you or your kids have seen.
For starters, What Breathes Through Its Butt? has an excellent title and all but dares elementary through middle-school children to read it. Once they open the book they’ll immediately notice that, for a nature book about animals, it’s devoid of animal photographs. In their place are black and white pictures of animals and kids that one wouldn’t immediately associate with education. These illustrations by Alice Bowsher, seem more at home with folk art or a mural that you’d see whilst driving through a quaint downtown area.
The presentation and text by Dr. Emily Grossman will also shake up young readers who are expecting a traditional ‘animal book’. They’re expecting photos or illustrations of animals that are placed beside a paragraph or two about what they eat, where they live, and so forth.
Instead, What Breathes Through Its Butt? starts out with a brief introduction by Grossman. She explains why she thinks science is wonderful. Her argument on why it’s great is probably the same as children who find it interesting. Science is all about asking wacky or thought-provoking questions, finding out the answers, and then asking some more. That is the fun aspect that can get kids hooked on it.
This book is a series of questions, posed at the beginning of each mini-chapter, which is about four pages long. For example, what’s the best way to escape the grip of a crocodile’s jaw? That’s a question that’s posed in the book. It’s written in big, playful font on one page, with four possible answers and a confused looking crocodile also. The next couple of pages have a series of figures, with some crocodiles and the text going over various situations and how each answer would help you escape its jaw.
Grossman does what any erstwhile Frizzle would do and takes chances, gets messy, and makes mistakes. By going over all of the options she lets kids understand the way that the scientific method works in a way that they can understand. The text is written and presented in a variety of ways that also draw in young readers. Before kids know it they’ve read a couple of pages about a non-fiction topic they didn’t know that they had an interest in.
More importantly, it does so in a way that makes them ask questions. They’re questions that they’ve probably never asked themselves, but are ones that will help water their curious question maker on other things once they’ve finished reading the book. And as any Frizzle wannabe, or any parent who wants their children to have those traits, asking questions about things that we don’t know the answer to is always a great thing.
What Breathes Through Its Butt?, Mind-Blowing Science Questions Answered is by Dr. Emily Grossman with illustrations by Alice Bowsher and available on Bloomsbury Children’s Books.
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