Curious Creatures Armadillos (Armadillo Day is the 13th August)

I have been contemplating talking to my students about armadillos because at the moment many of them think aardvarks and armadillos are interchangeable. This is not a major issue because we have neither of these animals in Australia and it is much more important that they know about animals such as echidnas, bandicoots and bilbies etc that live here, but as we are talking about 'curious creatures' and we have books that feature them I thought I would do a little bit of research.  Firstly I noticed that a new Jon Klassen book is about to hit the shelves next year and it has an armadillo in it. Here's the publisher's blurb for The Rock From the Sky

"Turtle really likes standing in his favorite spot. He likes it so much that he asks his friend Armadillo to come over and stand in it, too. But now that Armadillo is standing in that spot, he has a bad feeling about it . . . 

Here comes The Rock from the Sky, a hilarious meditation on the workings of friendship, fate, shared futuristic visions, and that funny feeling you get that there’s something off somewhere, but you just can’t put your finger on it. Merging broad visual suspense with wry wit, celebrated picture book creator Jon Klassen gives us a wholly original comedy for the ages."

Now this armadillo does not look particularly like the ones we have in other books, so all the more reason I need to find a photograph. All the species of armadillos can be found in the Americas. This website gives some good photos and some interesting facts.

Here's the books the library has:

             

• Armadillos by Kate Riggs

• Ape and Armadillo Take Over the World by James Sturm

• The Armadillo fom Amarillo by Lynne Cherry

• Willow the Armadillo by Marilou Reeder and Dave Mottram

• Arnie the Accidental Hero  by Joanne Partis

• Milo Armadillo by Jan Fearnley

• Armadillo Ray  by John Beifuss and Peggy Turley

• An Armadillo in Paris by Julie Kraulis

• Accident! by Andrea Tsurumi

• The Wishing Stone by Steve Smallman and Rebecca Elliott

• The Beginning of the Armadillos by Shoo Rayner 

and two series for chapter book reading young readers

• Hare and Armadillo  by Jeremy Strong

• Adventure Duck vs the Armadillo Army by Steve Cole

Curious Creatures - the Aardvark and the Pangolin

While sharing Hello Hello  by Brian Wenzel with Year 1 classes we looked closely at the

animals on the endpapers and tried to name the animals we saw. There was much discussion of the aardvark. Most students thought it was an armadillo or an anteater so when we got the back of the book where it tells you what the animals are and how endangered they are we discovered that it was in fact an aardvark. The pangolin on the cover caused quite a frenzied discussion as well, so this week we shared Tenrec's Twigs by Bert Kitchen, watched a short BBC Attenborough film clip  on Madagascan animals and  thus looked in more detail at pangolins. This book allows students to empathise with the tenrec as he tries to solve his dilemma.

I went looking in the library for books which would allow further exploration and managed to find:

Pangolins:

• What in the World is a Pangolin? by Edward R. Ricciuti 

• Pangolins  by Victoria Blakemore

• Roly Poly Pangolin by Anna Dewdney

• Pinkie Mouse, Where Are You? by Alison Green and Deborah Allwright

Aardvarks:

• Aardvarks by Maddie Gibbs

• Aardvark or Anteater?  by Tamra Orr

• Awkward Aardvark by Mwalimu and Adrienne Kennaway

• Aalfred and Aalbert by Morag Hood

• It's an Orange Aardvark by Michael Hall

• Can an  Aardvark Bark? by Melissa Stewart and Steve Jenkins

• The Aardvark Who Wasn't Sure  by Jill Tomlinson

And just for fun AA is For Aardvark by by Mark Schulman, Aardvarks Disembark by Ann Jonas and Oi Aardvark! by Kes Gray and Jim Field which is coming soon.

Curious Creatures

 

As part of the theme 'Curious Creatures, Wild Minds' one of the displays in the library this week focussed on 'long necks'. We displayed books with animals who have long necks such as giraffes, alpacas, llamas, camels, ostriches, emus, and flamingoes together with some quiz questions to get the students talking. 

Among the books was Jo Bertini's A Man and his Camel. This is a very old picture book first published in 1996, but I have never quite brought myself to the point of withdrawing it from stock. Why? Well it fits into many themes; journeys, searches, home, deserts, camels, Tibet, Silk Road and endangered species and you are never quite sure when you'll be asked for a book. I picked it up to read while one of my Year 2 classes were doing some independent silent reading. Beside the Bactrian camel (the camel with two humps) there were other animals unknown to my students such as the musk deer, red panda, desman, otter, large mouse-eared bat, great bustard, sand gazelle, fenec fox, Crespi pelican, ibex, markhor, woolly flying squirrel and a jerboa. Yes, a multitude of curious creatures!

The man travelled from Pakistan, across the Himalayan Mountains into Kashmir, through Tibet to China, on to Mongolia,  Russia and the Volga River, on to Turkey, Syria and Lebanon, then to Israel and Egypt. From Alexandria around the Red Sea and into Saudi Arabia before going through Iraq to Iran. Next Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Samarkand, over the Kashgar Crossing, across the Pamir Mountains, down the Kunnjerab Pass and back into Pakistan. What a journey? Older students could plot this journey on a map!

The choice of vocabulary is also worth noting. There are verbs such as:  gazed; puzzled; shrugged; console; caution; dally; muster; sighed; chimed; fringe; lowed; bid; chortled; and thumped. There are descriptions:

- a melancholy reindeer whose antlers hung in sorrow-filled folds 

- floating on her back, leaf-like in the waves

- who is threading a trail to...

- in a whorl of winds and rufous feathers

- a querulous creature and prone to hysteria

- there across a mirage of woollen pyramids

- camel herd had gathered in conference

So much to explore and I haven't mentioned the illustrations. Jo Bertini is an Australian artist but unfortunately I cannot find any other picture books by her. If your library hasn't discarded it, have a look. It is full of curious creatures and Jo Bertini has a wild mind!

Curious Creatures

The book The Curious Ar-Chew is the perfect book to share with a young class while you are exploring the Book Week theme, Curious Creatures Wild Minds. 

 "Three woodland friends (a hedgehog, a goose and a rabbit) puzzle over the identity of a very strange creature asleep in the hollow of a tree. It has orange rubbery feet like a goose, long ears like a rabbit  and a thick woolly coat like a lamb. "  

I read it to my four Kindergarten classes this week and  the story certainly captured their interest and kept them guessing as to what the creature was. When the answer is revealed on the last page there was a loud sigh of  'oh yeh', as they put the clues together. We had talked the previous week about just what 'curious' meant and many remembered that it had two meanings. The hedgehog, the goose and the rabbit were curious to know what the creature in the hollow was. They thought it was 'curious' because it was 'strange' to them. Once the children knew that the creature was a child they then wanted to talk about whether she was curious or not. We made a list of things she could be curious about. With older children you could also discuss who has the wild mind in this story and get them to support their reasoning with evidence from the book.

This book is the debut picture book for New Zealand author Sarah Grundy. It won the Storylines Joy Cowley Award in 2016 for Sarah and the illustrators, husband and wife team Ali Teo and by John O'Reilly. If you do not have this book in your library, but you have a subscription to Story Box Library, you will find it there.