Loreen Leedy

Guess the baby animal from its footprints. Bold digital portraits reveal each animal in realistic detail on the verso pages. (The alligator hatchling and woolly bear caterpillar are standouts.) An index of footprints offers some bonus animal facts.

A read-aloud gem found among the children's non-fiction here at IndyPL. Babies can bounce along and play peek-a-boo with the animals. Young toddlers can enjoy wildly guessing who's who from the footprints.

Song pairings: "The wheels on the bus"

Missing Math is a wonderful book to show the power of numbers. When the numbers in town start to disappear, a detective goes on the hunt to find the thief. The teams in town can’t play sports, no mail can be sent out, money has no value, and much more. Along the way, new vocabulary words and their definitions appear like: numberless, estimate, quantities, calculate, and infinity. When the detective finds the culprit, his excuse is that he wanted to make the longest number ever seen, one to show more reach infinity. With colorful illustrations and a rhyming scheme, this is a fun book to aid in learning math vocabulary. Students will recognize the importance of numbers and how hectic the world would be if there weren’t any. show less

I had so much fun reading this book with my best friend’s seven year old! Because he’s not really a book kid, I didn’t even think about testing it on him. But one day I had him in the car with me and he saw it laying on the passenger‘s seat. The cover page must have really captured his interest, because he immediately started flipping through the pages. After a few minutes of flipping he asked me “what is this book?” with wonder in his voice, as if he had never seen anything like show more it. We had a little bit of fun reading the crazy sayings, but I think he was most impressed with what this book has to offer visually. It is equal parts wacky and magical, which works wonders on a younger audience especially, but would also be amusing to an older crowd, I think (it worked on me). All of the images in the book are meant to depict different figures of speech that involve animals. The book is organized by types of animals--starting with the more familiar animals that you find “around the house” and ending with the more unfamiliar creatures found “under the waves.” The book also includes a definition of each figure of speech, explained in clear, simple terms. Although this book is probably most appropriate for elementary school children, I think that this book has a lot to offer both younger and older readers. The drawing in this book are wonderful: rich with color, animated, and imaginative. I think this book could offer some excitement to my English class when we go over figurative language. Overall, a very enjoyable book that I would recommend to a variety of readers! show less

I liked this AND I learned something from it. Crazy. The best feature, if you ask me, is the Good News and Bad News about each energy source. That is the heart of the energy debate, so it's nice to see it highlighted.

The layout is a little busy (the way that Magic School Bus books are), but I have the give this book props for the clarity of the writing.

This arrived at my library alongside [b:Earth Feeling the Heat], which was completely depressing, so that made me appreciate this book all show more the more. show less