Animalia is a classic, loved by kids of all ages as well as adults. You would think that an alphabet book would be more for little kids, but not this ones.
And it would be a great mentor text for lessons in either alliteration or sentence building – or better yet a fun lesson that combines both!Īs with many language arts skills, kids have come across both alliteration and sentence building any number of times before entering the middle grades, but combining these two skills can result in an interesting exercise that is fun and challenging for kids at many ability levels. It's made for kids that are past the age where you are teaching them the alphabet, and just plays with words and images.Animalia, by Graeme Base, is an alphabet book that is entertaining people of all ages. We want them to understand that language is fun to play with. Otherwise the kids just get lost when they encounter them. We don't just want to teach them the basic words, we want to teach them the complicated ones. That's part of the point of reading to kids to teach them words and expand their vocabularies. Like, "Ingenious iguanas improvising an intricate impromptu on impossibly impractical instruments." I like it when children's books use complex words, because kids deserve to understand that those words exist and what they mean. The words are also complicated instead of simplistic.
I don't think we owned this book as a child and probably checked it out from the library, but I remember spending hours with my mother and sister just trying to see what I could find in all the details, all the hidden little things that are tucked into every corner of the image. All the images are animals doing various actions. They are filled with small details that all start with that letter, and also a small boy hiding on it, who is apparently supposed to represent the artist. Many of them span an entire page or a two-page spread. Every image has a sentence where almost all the words start with a letter of the alphabet, with the exception of "X" which is cleverly backwards, reflected in a mirror, and ends with that letter. It's a series of incredibly detailed watercolor paintings.
I read this book as a child, and it still holds up today.
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