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A Candidate for a Child's Home Library

7/5/2020

 
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In my last post, I quoted a literacy statistic for a children's home library, "Children growing up in homes with at least twenty books get three years more schooling than children from bookless homes, independent of their parents’ education, occupation, and class." A children's home library contains books that, by definition,  will be read more than once. Roxie Munro's glorious adventure under water on a coral reef, Dive In: Swim with Sea Creatures at Their Actual Size, is a perfect candidate.  

Dive In is enticing on so many levels.  As someone who has had the memorable experience of snorkeling at the Great Barrier Reef, once was not enough but once is all I got.  Munro's book powerfully creates the experience. You are immersed and absorbed,  never leaving the sea, viewing 29 of the gorgeous, quirky, fantastical inhabitants of coral reefs.  It deserves to be revisited time and time again.  

Did you ever hear of a spotted cleaner shrimp or a longsnout seahorse or the queen triggerfish, to name a few?  And what's that gray thing that starts looming in the background on 15,16, 17, 18 and  folds out into two double-spreads on pages 19-22 to reveal a reef shark that is 8 feet long?  (Measuring that critter, alone, is worth owning the book.)  

This is a book that commands study and involvement that goes way beyond the five-minute bedtime read.  Munro includes a simple fact or two  for each critter that are gems:
      
          "The common octopus is a mollusk, as are snails, clams, and squids.  Like a squid,
            an octopus also changes colors and patterns to camouflage itself.  An octopus has
            excellent vision and a large brain, and is considered the most intelligent, 
            invertebrate.  It even uses tools to build its den, which might feature a door that
            opens and closes!"

My kid-like curious brain is teeming with questions to know more. If it's a mollusk, where's its shell? How many colors can it be? How do we know that?  What does its eyes have to do with the size of its brain?  

The back-matter reveals a key to the 29 different species as a "walk in the park" diagram including the relative sizes depicted as actual size in the book.  Yep, there's the reef shark, taking up space in the middle.  And the end papers feature coral reefs of the world, including the one I dove into.

Roxie Munro brings the skills of a fine artist and the discipline of a diligent nonfiction author to revealing a complex and glorious ecosystem currently under attack from global warming.  

If Dive In is the first book on coral reefs in a child's library, it will not be the last.  







Don’t Say “Eek!;” Say, “How Interesting!”

30/1/2018

 
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Most people think of rats and mice as animals with really bad reputations.  After all, many live in filthy areas where we wouldn’t want to go. They've been known to carry fleas that were vectors of disease. However, according to Roxie Munro, author/illustrator of a glorious picture book called Rodent Rascals, we are lucky to have them. Yes, rats are our friends. They come in all sizes and shapes and have been used by humans as a source of fur, food, pets, and laboratory subjects. What makes them a distinctive order of mammals?  They all have a set of front teeth, called incisors, that never stop growing and make rodents capable of gnawing through some of the toughest materials around. Their constant nibbling wears the teeth down to a manageable size and allows them to build dams, drink wine (probably out of oaken vats, in which they’ve made a hole), hollow tunnels and crack acorns, among other marvelous tasks.

Munro’s book is a collection of rodent stars selected by size from the smallest—the pygmy jerboa-who can be up to two inches—to the largest—the greater capybara of South America—who weighs in at 150 pounds.  She has drawn her collection at actual size, so all you see of the capybara is its head and its back leg on the previous page.  As far as the “rascally” part, Munro gives us the most endearing traits of each selection to impress us with their cleverness, their survival skills, and their value to us. (Did you know there is a rat that has been trained to help electricians by carrying wires through small spaces?)

The value of this beautiful, informative picture book is as a survey of what exists so it can whet the reader’s appetite for more information.  In the back matter of the book, you do learn more about the specific size of each rodent and more of its amazing abilities.  These snippets of information make the subjects even more intriguing.   If this is the first book a child (or even an adult) reads about rodents, it will not be the last. Munro's rodents have such appealing personalities.  You might even add a new affectionate family member with soft fur and bright eyes and a deep understanding of the rat race. 


     Vicki Cobb

    *Award-winning author of more than 90 nonfiction books for children, mostly in science.
    *Former Contributor to the Huffington Post
    *Founder/President of iNK Think Tank, Inc.
    *Passionate advocate for the joy of learning for every child and teacher.


    Disclaimer: All opinions, typos, and grammatical errors are my own,  especially small word omissions which I often don't notice in my fervor.  

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