If your kids are like mine, they are incredibly inquisitive and ask more questions than I can count in a day. (More than I can usually answer, too.) I just love seeing how much information their amazing little minds can hold and how much they love learning new things. And their capacity to remember it all simply astounds me, especially since my memory is like that of a goldfish these days. My kids also love animals -- my son, especially -- and we've learned so much together about the world's amazing creatures. I wasn't surprised, then, when he brought this book home from his last visit to the library. We renewed it in order to bring it on vacation with us, and have enjoyed learning some great animal facts along the way. While the parent in me thinks that this book is one worth featuring here on the blog, it's the teacher in me who really thinks it's post-worthy.
If you are unfamiliar with infographics, they are pictures that give you information in a very visual way. They can take the form of maps, graphs, or charts, among other things, and aim to make information easy to understand. I'm sure you've seen them everywhere: in magazines, ads, newspapers, etc. As a geography teacher, I can honestly admit that I love a good infographic! Here's an example, courtesy of PBS:
Source: PBS Nature
I realized once I became a teacher that as an adult, it is easy to assume that children know how to make sense of this type of visual information; after all, we can look at such pictures and understand them (and probably don't remember ever learning how to do that in school.) Interpreting this kind of data, though, is really its own literacy skill; one which we can help our children learn and which will, in turn, nourish their growth as thinkers and readers.
Animal Infographics is a perfect first book for this very thing, featuring plenty of fun animal facts in a visually simple way. (I would have featured a page from the book itself, but couldn't find any examples online and didn't want to risk violating any copyright rules or anything.) It starts out with a simple pie chart about the number of different types of pets in the United States, and goes on to show all kinds of other information: a comparison of the weights of different animals (for example, that 1 blue whale = 22 African elephants), the world's biggest and smallest animals (compared to a human), food chains, food webs, life cycles, life spans, you name it. There is even a page that shows a timeline of prehistoric animals, easily demonstrating, for example, the fact that Stegosaurus and Tyrannosaurus Rex did not live in the same time period. There is a short glossary at the end, as well as other sources for learning more about the topics in the book. The only thing that seemed a little confusing to my kids was that things are not pictured in their actual size, but rather in comparative scale to one another. (We have and love Steve Jenkins' book Actual Size, which might account for some of their initial confusion.) But that's the whole point, really; to teach them how to interpret visual information in a new way so that it makes sense! There is a series of these books featuring other topics such as population and the environment, as well, so I'm sure we'll be bringing home some of the others in the months to come.
If you're looking for a great non-fiction book to add to your little one's library or if you are an elementary teacher, be sure to check out this book. The more we can expose our kids to a range of reading materials, the better!
