Eric Carle's Animals Animals

An excellent introduction to poetry for both parents and children. The poems are widely appealing and unpretentious, easily remembered, and the art is lovely enough to bring children back to the book again and again. I would consider this an essential poetry book for children.

Eric Carle's Animals Animals is a collection of poems about animals by various poets. Eric Carle has illustrated the book and like all his work they are colorful and beautiful. I really enjoyed the variety of poems included in the collection. It has some poems that were obviously written for kids and others that were not necessarily written for kids. One of my favorites was "Bat" by D.H. Lawrence. It describes a bat flying through the air and compares it to "a black glove thrown up at the light, And falling back." Another of my favorites was "Butterfly" by Benjamin Franklin. It was a simple two line poem (What is a butterfly? At best/He's but a caterpillar dressed.) I found myself thinking about it after I finished reading the book. My show more daughter (3 years old) enjoyed the sillier peoms more than the descriptive ones. Her favorites were "The Birthday Cow," which wished a cow a "Happy Mooday" and ""Quack!" Said the Billy Goat," which described some mixed up farm animals. She also really liked the colorful illustrations. I recommend this book to anyone who enjoys Eric Carle's art or who wants a fun poetry collection to share with children. show less

I'm glad to learn that this is on openlibrary, but it also deserves to be oversize hardcover, like the edition my library lent me. If you like Carle's work, as most ppl do, you'll love this. Except for the picture of the narwhal, which Carle got wrong.

I do like the selection that Whipple made. As the blurb says, everything from Shakespeare to Prelutsky to haiku, even a couple of Native American verses.

Animals, Animals is a book full of short poems relating to a different animal on every page. When I picked this book up, I was expecting it to be similar to Eric Carle's other books like The Very Busy Spider and consist of a story like that one instead of the poems. Many different authors write the poems written in the book, but Carle put them together. I thought Carle’s poem approach to discuss all different types of animals was creative.
I really enjoyed the amount of animals in this book. There are over 80 pages full of different animals. Some of the animals included were a flying squirrel and narwhal. I thought this was important especially for young children to read. In most ‘typical’ picture books, there are cats, dogs, show more fish, cows, etc. This book shows all different animals. Carle’s illustrations are beautiful. He portrays the animals in a perfect way without including too much detail to be distracting from the words. These illustrations accurately show the animals being discussed. Another thing I really enjoyed from this book was some of the rhyming words in the poems. For example in one poem “-potamus” is rhymed with “bottamus.” I really liked that because it allows for fun for the children reading the poems. It shows that you can be silly and enjoy reading. While the poems are super informative, they are also fun and silly so that people want to continue to read the book. The big idea or message in this book would be that all animals are different and have their own characteristics. It is important to take notice of all animals because they are all special in their own way. Overall, I thoroughly appreciated this book, even if I was originally expecting something different. show less

I thought this was a great book for young readers because of its unique illustrations. The author uses a collage technique in which hand-painted papers are layered together forming bright and colorful images. I also like the style of this book. Instead of a typical story, poems are used. In addition, these poems are from such diverse sources such as Shakespeare, Lewis Carroll, Rudyard Kipling, Emily Dickinson, and Jack Prelutsky. The idea of this book is to present animal stories in a different way.

From leaping, flying fish to dancing butterflies, and camels that "trollop along," Eric Carle's brilliant and colorful collage designs bring to life animal poems from such diverse sources as Shakespeare, Lewis Carroll, Rudyard Kipling, Emily Dickinson, and Jack Prelutsky, as well as Bible verses, Japanese haiku, American Indian poems and more. This is a great read-aloud book.

This is a very interesting book for the younger group of students.I like the very first poem that was in the front of the book about us all being God's children. I think it is very import for the children to read that and understand that we may come in different sizes,shapes and colors but we are all still created to be God's child. The setup of the book is very different from most books every page has a different poem about a different animal or insect. The children are learning a lot information about animals.