My kids love animals, and so do we.
I’d love to live on a hobby farm with a miniature donkey and some fainting goats. I’d love to have cats and fish and a guinea pig in the house … alas, we barely have room for animal books let alone actual animals with four kids in a two-bedroom townhouse!
While we await a time when we can afford more space and some actual animal companions, we must content ourselves with our neighbours’ dogs and lots of books about all of earth’s creatures. Here are four animal-themed titles from DK Books that my oldest children, ages 3 and 6, are wild about!
This book is an absolutely stunning tome for children from about age 3 and up. We offered it as a gift to a special friend on her third birthday!
The illustrations are breathtakingly beautiful, and the golden edges on the pages and ribbon bookmark make it feel extra special. This is the kind of book a child can get lost in for hours.
I love that this book is adaptable to both of my kids: the more subtle details can be discovered by my 6-year-old while his 3-year-old sister can work on the more obvious “hidden” creatures.
The fold-out pages are beautiful and engrossing, but we have to keep them away from the babies! Naturally, the wolf-pack page is our favourite.
There’s nothing my son likes to know more about a given animal than exactly how deadly it is. Who’d win in a fight between a great white shark and a grizzly bear? We will likely never know. Although I guess it depends if the fight is on land or water?
The page about the rainbow mantis shrimp is a particular favourite, as is the episode of Octonauts featuring this fascinating creature. (Grown ups should check out the Radiolab episode about this sea-dweller or read The Oatmeal to find out why the mantis shrimp is their new favourite animal.)
To this day I still forget that PENGUINS and POLAR BEARS never meet in real life. Children’s television and fiction—not to mention ice cream packaging—would have you believe that these polar opposites (literally) are BFFs 4Ever. I once got in an argument with my husband about whether there are tigers in Africa (there are not; I was right) … I mean, lions and tigers are always palling around in cartoons! To avoid such confusion as adults, kids need the Illustrated Animal Atlas!
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