zoo books

In order to psyche myself up for honor of an upcoming preschool field trip to the zoo, I give you a few of my favorite zoo-themed picture books of recent memory:

This Dictionary of Ordinary Extraordinary Animals by Lisa McGuinness and Leslie Jonath has *extraordinary* illusrations by Lisa Congdon.  That's the first thing I noticed.  As I thumbed through the beautiful pages, I then noticed the neat details in the entries for many animals commonly featured in children's books.  The elder lad was enthralled by this book, barely looking up from it as we drove home from school the day we checked it out of the library.


Jan Ormerod's When We Went to the Zoo has going for it an engaging story with interesting prose and meter -- not quite rhythmic, but still poetic.  This is not a new book -- just new to us, but it has become one of my favorite zoo books because of the writing.

Recent release A Zeal of Zebras: An Alphabet of Collective Nouns by Woop Studios speaks right to my word nerd heart, even though I am not really that big a fan of alphabet books.  This one is different because of the creativity in describing a multiplicity of a certain animal -- not necessarily one whose name begins with the sequential letter of the alphabet. Initially the elder lad dismissed this book as a bit beneath him -- he knows his alphabet already, after all, but once we got to the page with "A Quiver of Cobras", followed soon after by "A Shiver of Sharks", both he and the younger lad were paying attention.  I bet they were all along. 

These books along with A Sick Day for Amos McGee (which I reviewed here) and Michael Bond's Paddington Goes to the Zoo are the first ones that come to mind when I think of zoo-themed books ... for good reason.  They -- along with the wonder and excitement that bubble up from each of the bambini -- might just convince me that all the effort to pack up and trek all over the zoo might just be fun after all.