Pistes d'exploration

Browse the book, noticing the use of font size, style and layout. How will these design choices influence how you read the book? Are they are effective or not?

With a partner, examine a double-page spread. Play an Eye Spy game by making up a clue about something on the page for your partner to answer and then switching roles.

Write a day-in-the-life diary entry from the point of view of one of the featured animals. Supplement your research with other resources.

Nominate an animal from a page or section for an award such as Most Dangerous, Best Pet or Least Friendly. Write a justification for your nomination. Make a poster for your award. Incorporate facts from the text.

Browse the book. Explore the structures and features. Notice the use of font size, style and layout. How will these design choices influence how you read the book? Are they are effective or not?

Explore how the names of these plants and animals have similar or different names in French and English.

With a partner, examine a double-page spread. Practise the names of animals. Play an Eye Spy game by making up a clue about something on the page for your partner to answer and then switching roles.

Nominate an animal from a page or section for an award such as Most Dangerous, Best Pet or Least Friendly. Write a justification for your nomination. Make a poster for your award. Incorporate facts from the text.

Familiarize yourself with how information is organized in this book (e.g. diagrams, scale graphs, sidebars, titles and subtitles, images). Select a double-page spread and practise reading the different text types to extract information and make meaning.

Select an animal and compare the information found in this book with that available on the internet. What are the advantages and disadvantages of each?

Use teacher-selected online software to produce a trivia game based on information taken from the book. Play as a class to check your learning.

Mots-clés

Non-fiction , animal classification , animals , encyclopedias , illustrations (photographs) , reference , science

Commentaire descriptif

This big, beautiful book is a great resource for general questions of a botanical and zoological nature. Heaps of gorgeously detailed images provide a visual compendium, organized through colour-coded chapters. A foreword and a section called “The Tree of Life” provide helpful overviews. Icons illustrate key features of the various classifications, while “scale boxes” illustrate the size of every creature, when compared to a thumb, hand or child. Quality close-up photography shows creatures in all their glory, whether it’s a dramatic, full-page shot (such as the African bush viper with a frog in its jaws) or arrays of species within a given group (such as owls, saltwater fish, flowering plants, bacteria and more). Very brief captions offer key information about every plant and animal shown, along with a summary introduction to each section. “The largest group of animals, invertebrates range from sponges and jellyfish to shellfish, crabs, spiders and insects”. A detailed table of contents, along with the index, ensure that nothing in these pages need go undiscovered.