Great Non-Fiction for Boys
The cover of the book alone is appealing because it is a hologram that morphs into four different animals. You have to tilt it just right to get all four images but this was really fun for my preschooler-soon-to-be-Kindergartener son. I don’t want to spoil the surprise so I won’t tell you which four animals appear, but hint: they all have fangs!!
This is an appealing non-fiction series for preschoolers through 1st graders, particularly for reluctant young boy readers. The text is larger than most books and is composed of short sentences, usually about 3 per page. Each animal gets a full page spread full of attractive color photographs. There is a box with factoids that include information on the animal’s length, color, food, where found, and sometimes a number of animals.
My elementary school encourages children to read non-fiction so that they understand that the captions under photographs or the separate box of factoids are important elements of the text (and come into play during standardized state tests). But my son and I like to read non-fiction because it’s fun and we learn all kinds of interesting factoids.
So what did we learn?
- The Black Mamba (Dendroaspis polylepsis) is the largest venomous snake in Africa at up to 14 feet long!
- The venom of a king cobra (Naja) can kill a full-grown elephant!
- Tigers (Panthera tigris) can eat up to 90 pounds of meat in one day!
- Some scorpions can go a year without eating!
I also have Poison! from this series. The layout is completely different and the text font size is much smaller though the information is similar to Fangs! I couldn’t find this on Amazon and I’m not sure why. I do think reluctant readers prefer larger font size, so I’d recommend starting with Fangs!
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BEST #OWNVOICES CHILDREN’S BOOKS: My Favorite Diversity Books for Kids Ages 1-12 is a book that I created to highlight books written by authors who share the same marginalized identity as the characters in their books.