Science Sunday Review: Fur and Feathers

The Bibliophile and I read a great book this morning that I thought I would share for Science Sunday.

Fur and Feathers by Janet Halfmann.

Sophia has a dream (or was it?) about a strong wind so fierce that it whips the coats right off of a motley assortment of animals.  Determined to help remedy the situation, she grabs her grandmother's sewing basket and sets about making suitable coverings for them - a warm white coat for the polar bear, prickly quills for the porcupine, slimy scales for the fish, etc.  This was a fun read, and Laurie Allen Klein's illustrations are lovely and engaging.

The end of the book contains a wonderful brief educational section on animal coverings and classification.  We didn't do a formal companion activity or lesson (although we might have some fun in my fabric stash later talking about which fabrics might be suitable for different animals).  We did sit for awhile with the educational pages, though, talking about what the word "mammal" means, as I quizzed him a little with simple questions like, "which animal would need a nice warm coat because he lives somewhere cold?" etc.  Obviously I kept things simple for my almost-3 year old, but this could be a wonderful resource for slightly older children too.

The educational pages at the back of the book are actually available for free for perusing in pdf form on the Sylvan Dell Publishing website (just click on the Fur and Feathers book title), as are the educational sections of about 50 more titles!  This is a great resource for homeschooling -- it allows you to peek at the educational components, decide what might be useful in a unit study, and then get the books that will work for you.  I think I'll print the animal classifications page later so we can play with dividing up his plastic toy animals into a few simple categories.  I have been spending a lot of time on the site this morning, and I suspect that we will be also be hunting down a number of other titles!

As for the Bibliophile, it was two thumbs up from him.  He said "I want to read another e-book!" as soon as we finished reading our electronic copy, and he informed me that he liked the book, because "it had a lot of animals."  He sat in rapt attention for the first half, and then started asking appropriate questions during the second half. 

You can view a book trailer for the book here.

I am linking this post up with Science Sunday.

You can see more of our science related posts here, homeschooling related posts here, and other reviews of books about zoo animals here.

Comment: What science fun have you been up to this week?  Have you taught your kids about scientific/animal classification in any creative ways?  And while you are visiting, do you have any cures for pregnancy heartburn?  :)

Disclosure: I was provided a link to an e-book for Fur and Feathers from Sylvan Dell Publishing in order to write this review.  If you click on any of the links in this post and purchase anything, we may earn a small commission through our affiliate relationship with Amazon.com.