If you have a little boy, he (and you!) will love this book! I picked Teeth Tails and Tentacles up a few years ago in the bargain section at Borders (sniff, sniff), and it has exceeded my expectations! I was drawn to the wood cut images; they look very masculine in their dark colors, and many of the animals pictured are the rough and tough ones our little boys admire like crocodiles, octopuses, bears, and leopards. As a counting book, I LOVE that it actually goes up to twenty rather than stopping at ten. The other plus is that my kids learned all sorts of new vocabulary like tentacle, regenerate, and segments. In the back of the book, the author has included a short blurb on each of the twenty-one animals featured, which Earthworm (4) also enjoyed. I would recommend this book for kids ages 2 – 8 years old, particularly boys or any child interested in animals.

Let’s take it further.

• Label paper plates or index cards with numbers and see if your child can pile the correct number of small toy animals on top.
•  Make your own wood cutting stamps… with potatoes! Just slice on in half and help your child use a toothpick, spoon, or pencil to carve out an image they can stamp and then color in once dry. (Here’s a fun tutorial for making them.)
• See if your kids can draw a picture to show they understand some of the more complicated words in this book. Or, for younger kids, see if they can find and itentify the picture in the book. Some of the words you might choose are humps, tentacles, stag, antler, segments, and rosettes. If you read the additional animal information in the back of the book then add these words (one for each animal, in order) endangered, burden, environment, distinctive, invertebrate, aquatic, temperate, regenerate, nocturnal, territory, migratory, annually, emerge, dominance, camouflage, extend, herbivore, predators, interlocking, drift, expel.
• I’ve created two free resources for you to use with this book that you can view and download below. The first can be laminated or placed in a sheet protector. You fill in the number and instruct your child to draw the correct number of missing spikes, fins, teeth or legs or create them with play dough. These are free for personal or classroom use, but please credit this website if you repost them.

Teeth, Tails, & Tentacles learning resources

You find a link to this post, along with others, at Homeschool Creations.

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Tags: animals, boys, Christopher Wormell, counting, downloadable resources, education, numbers, tails, teeth, tentacles

Categories: animals, boys, downloadable resources, numbers, picture books | 2 Comments »