Animal Homes

Home is where you feel safe – and we all need a safe place to sleep, eat, and keep warm (or cool). My home probably doesn’t look like your home, and it definitely doesn’t look like a polar bear’s home. Reading these books is like doing armchair open-houses! Today's themes are: animals, home, family

Finding Home: Amazing Places Animals Live 

by Mike Unwin; illus. by Jenni Desmond 

48 pages; ages 7-9

Bloomsbury Children's Books, 2025 

If you could have any home that you wanted, what would you choose?

Once upon a time I dreamed of living in a castle. And then I had an opportunity to spend a summer in a small dome, with a sleeping loft and just enough room. So I’m always intrigued to see what sorts of housing choices other folks make. Mike Unwin shows the different sorts of homes animals make, from aardvarks to wasps and everything in between.

Readers visit a polar bear snow den, a puffin burrow, and the mobile home of a hermit crab. There are condos for the social beings – termites, wasps, weaver birds – and more solitary accommodations for the loners. There are tree houses, earthen houses, stick houses and houses built of straw.

What I like about this book: the section titles are lots of fun. “Hanging around” for the three-toed sloth who … hangs in the treetops of tropical forests. Or “All sewn up” for the tailorbirds that use plant fibers and spider silk to stitch leaves together for their nest. Main text – and there’s a page full for each species – explains how the animals build their home, raise families, and live in their environment. Supplemental text provides fun facts. 

A Home Like This (Board book )

by Laura Purdie Salas; illus. by Miriam Nerlove 

7 spreads

Creative Editions, 2025

The text and artwork show a diversity of animal homes. Some are open to the sky, some are more sheltered. Some are temporary, some are permanent. 

What I like about this book: read altogether, the pages are a poem. For each spread, illustrations show the animal and its home. The last spread includes some human dwellings amongst the wild, and emphasizes that home is where the heart is. As I was reading this book, I kept feeling as though I’d met this illustrator before. And indeed, I reviewed two of Miriam Nerlove’s board books a few years ago here on this very blog!

Beyond the Books:

Make a drawing or model of your home. If you had to explain to a rabbit or an anteater about where you live, what would you tell them?

Animals use what’s in their habitat to build their homes. Check out this video to see some of the shelters they construct. 

Walk around your yard and take stock of the natural materials you could use to build a home. It could be snow or mud, dried grass or twigs. Then collect a few of those materials and build a model nest or shelter. 

Today we’re joining Perfect Picture Book Friday. It’s a wonderful gathering where bloggers share great picture books at Susanna Leonard Hill's website. Review copies provided by the publishers.