22nd September World Rhinoceros Day

I have written about rhinos before here, but I wanted to add some books to any celebration of Rhinoceros Day that you may have. I have been looking at 'true' animal stories while exploring the Book Week theme, Curious Creatures Wild Minds, with one of my classes. We looked at Rhino in the House: the True Story of Saving Samia and  Anna and Samia: the True Story of Saving a Black Rhino. Both of these books tell the story of Anna Merz, a wildlife conservationist and a baby black rhino that she rescues and plans to rehabilitate, ready to send back into the wild. She nurtures the calf, names it Samia, feeds it special formula, and even lets it sleep in her bed. The children were fascinated by what Anna did.          

We then looked at My Travels With Clara, a book that follows the travels of a Dutch sea-captain and a black rhino from India to Venice with many adventures along the way. This story is reminiscent of the story of Zeraffa Giraffa, where a giraffe  travels from Africa to Paris.

Then last Thursday I covered and catalogued a new book called Rhinocorn Rules!  by Matt Carr and was pleasantly surprised to see that this book delivered far more than I thought it would. My readers like Matt Carr books, zany animal books, iridescent colours and unicorns so I picked it up in the book shop. On reading it, I found that the last two pages offered amazing facts about rhinos succinctly but very pertinently, perfect for Endangered Species Day.

See these and other rhino titles here on
my Pinterest page.

1st May Save the Rhino Day

Today I went looking in the library for books about rhinos and found...well not much. It seems that the rhinoceros is not an animal chosen by authors as a character for children's picture books. Is it because they are not seen as having endearing qualities physically or emotionally? But rhinos, especially black rhinos are endangered and we do need to make sure that they survive and thus, the need for Save the Rhino Day.

With my Year 2 classes at the moment we are researching animals of the African savannah and for most animals I have about ten good books. For rhinos only two, which are:

• Black Rhino by Rod Theodorou

• Black Rhino by Malcolm Perry

For reading for pleasure, Shoo Rayner's series that retells Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories are favourites with my young readers , so search out • How the Rhino Got His Skin. I also found The Cross-with-us Rhinoceros a well borrowed story by John Bush and Paul Geraghty.

And good news two new books about rhinos:

• My Rhinoceros by Jon Agee and

• Running Rhino a new title in that wonderful series by Mwenye Hadithi and Adrienne Kennaway.