Wild Animals (Animal Planet Animal Bites)

Beautiful bright and vivid photos. A nice book to read through together or for our 3 year old to look at alone.

was a gift

Great

This is the second one we've ordered because my grandson absolutely loves this book! I must for all kids that love wild animals!

Good pictures!

I'm a biologist (I teach the course on mammals at our local university), and have a three-year-old daughter. Naturally, she loves animals (like I do!), and I want to be sure she's learning a lot about them. This book is decent, but I have a few minor issues with it.The good:It's made well. Not hardback, but the covers are tough. Should stand up to kids who know not to rip pages.Good images. Plenty of visual interesting stuff throughout.The information is good. I didn't notice anything incorrect (you'd be surprised how often books like this get things wrong).The vocabulary is targeted at kids. Not too many big overwhelming technical words to confuse them (but see my negatives as well).The bad:My major gripe is with the animals selected. And it's only because I'm a biologist, and realize that 95% of the animals in the world are invertebrates, which are present but poorly represented in this book. Vertebrates (fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals) make up only 5% of the animal species in the world, and yet are over-represented everywhere the subject of animals comes up. Including in this book. There are plenty of additional interesting invertebrates that could have been included as well, but this book gets only a small handful. Most people will not mind.There isn't much technical information. A lot of kids like geeking out about that stuff (I did as a kid). Not one scientific name in the book. Technical terminology (which can be challenging, but helps train kids' minds and expand vocabularies at this critical age) is completely lacking. The book is dumbed down significantly over what it could be.The book isn't organized well. It's not an encyclopedia, and I guess it's not supposed to be. The table of contents isn't really helpful unless you want to find just one random sentence about a particular animal. This book is for browsing. There's no obvious progression or structure to it. I guess that's okay, but I like organization.Anyway, this is a good book, and an excellent choice for children interested in animals (which should be all kids, yes?). Not perfect, but the omissions are forgivable.

I wanted to review this to look at it with my granddaughter but reading the book made me realize she is too little (2). Neither the pictures, nor the interesting information will mean anything to her. I however am enjoying reading it. Has lots of pictures and good information. It is thinner than I thought it would be because the description says it has 100 pictures but there are may on a page so that's why. However it is made well and could withstand some spills and kid's hands. Once granddaughter is about 6 or 7, we will look at this book together. The information isn't overwhelming but may foster more interest and more exploring. The book sells for under $10 so it certainly is worth getting for any child who loves animals of all kinds, including the creepy crawlies.

This book has great, full-color photographs of animals, and I love the sturdy paperback design. It has the "feel" of a nice hardback book without being nearly as heavy. The organization of the book is a bit strange, and the pages are organized around themes and concepts rather than a more traditional organization. This makes the book seem haphazard to read from front to back, but I think most kids will approach this as a fun book to flip through and focus on the pictures. It's not really the kind of thing you read front to back.