More Animal Tails

What Do You Do With a Tail Like This?

By Steve Jenkins and Robin Page

32 pages, ages 4 – 9 

(and older!)

Houghton Mifflin Company, 2003

Seems like this is the week to share tales about tails. On Wednesday I chatted with Carrie Pearson about how some animals use tails to keep warm in the winter. And that reminded me of this cool book by Steve Jenkins and Robin Page. I love it for the wonderful paper collage illustrations… and that it is so quirky.

What do you do starts out with noses, not tails! Then ears – did you know that crickets hear with ears that are on their knees? Finally, a page about tails! There’s curly tails and swatty tails and stingy tails and stinky tails – peeuw! And the question is: what do you do with a tail like this?

If you’re a monkey, you hang from a tree. If you’re a lizard, you break off your tail and run away. After looking at feet and other adapted body parts, Jenkins and Page end with four pages of detailed notes on noses, ears, tails, eyes, feet and mouths. That’s where you learn that the nitty-gritty details about how skunks use their tails, why lizards don’t mind losing their tails, and why giraffes have that funny hank of hair on the end of their tails.

One more thing I really like about the book is the aesthetic appeal: it’s a square (10 inches by 10 inches) and the tail on the cover is a spiral. Review copy of this book found at my local library.

Check out more animal tails over at STEM Friday.

And join Nonfiction Monday over at "Wendie's Wanderings" for some cool nonfiction books!