The rest of this series is about animal bodies. This one is about an animal's address.
That is the whole difference, and it is bigger than it sounds. Its siblings on our shelf are otherwise the same book with the noun swapped: one animal to a spread, a Howard McWilliam cartoon of a child wearing or living in it, one true fact, next page. Same format here. Different subject, and the subject is the point.
$6.99, K to 3, read aloud in a quarter of an hour.
The science it actually teaches
A body is something an animal grew. A home is something an animal did. Doing is a category a five year old can sort things into, and growing is not.
The three homes named on the product page make the case without any help. A honeybee's home is manufactured: workers make wax out of their own bodies and build it into cells, and those cells hold the food and hold the young, which is why the line about room service is closer to true than it looks. A meerkat's home is excavated: a burrow system dug into hard ground, with tunnels, chambers and more than one way out. The reason a child could play hide and seek down there is the same reason a meerkat survives an eagle. A hermit crab's home is neither. The crab builds nothing and digs nothing. It moves into the empty shell of a dead snail, carries it around, and has to go shopping for a bigger one every time it outgrows the old one.
Made, dug, found. Every animal your child meets for the rest of the year drops into one of those three, and that is a tool rather than a fact. It is also the thing the tails book and the teeth book cannot give you, because a tail is simply issued to you at the factory. That sorting is the reason this one sits on our Stealth Science shelf ahead of the others.
Now the honest part about depth. The book does not draw that line itself. It sets the homes down next to each other and lets them sit there. The sorting is work you do out loud while you read, and it costs you one sentence.
The child it lands with
You have a builder in the house. The couch cushions, the blanket over two chairs, the cardboard box that has been a house since June. That child does not need to be sold on this book and will start planning before the second spread.
There is a second reader here, and it is not the obvious one. The child who does not much care for animal books at all. A home is rooms and doors and furniture, and that is a side entrance into biology for a kid who was never going to sit still for a book about beaks.
One place to stop and talk
One question, at the hermit crab, and only one. Where did that shell come from?
It came off an animal that died. The crab did not make it and could not make it. Sit in that for a second before you turn the page, because for a lot of young children it is the first time anything has suggested that a thing can be handed on after its owner has finished with it.
What to know going in
Nothing in this book is built to frighten anybody, and the one place a young child may stop you is the hermit crab, whose home came off an animal that is no longer using it.
The real caution is not content. It is the ending. Every book in this series closes on the same move: all these animals are wonderful and yours is just right for you. In the teeth book that is a sentence about your teeth. Here it is a sentence about your house. If your family is between homes, in a shelter, splitting time across two addresses, or has just moved somewhere your child did not want to go, that last page lands nowhere near where the author aimed it. It is a lovely page in a settled house. Read it yourself first and make the call.
And be honest with yourself about depth. Fifteen minutes, three real ideas, no unit of work attached. It teaches less than the cover implies, and it is still the best of the set.
Where to get it
It is $6.99 at What If You Had an Animal Home!?, which makes it the priciest of the set by a dollar or two, and it is the only one I would tell you to pay full price for.
If you buy exactly one of these, buy this one, for the reason the whole note above is about: it is the only one carrying an idea instead of a list. Buy a second only when the first one is worn out, and let your child choose which. The others are on the Stealth Science shelf, and they take in Animal Tail, Animal Ears, Animal Eyes, Animal Feet, Animal Teeth, Animal Scales, T. Rex Teeth, and the ocean spin-off Sniff Like a Shark. Lined up together they look like a collection and read like a photocopy.
If your child liked this one
Books we have written about that sit close to this one, by reading level and by subject.
Animal Scales: Fur, Feathers and the Same Five Jobs
What If You Had Animal Scales!? or Other Animal Coats? by Sandra Markle
Grade K to 3
Animal Teeth: Which What If You Had Book to Buy First
What If You Had Animal Teeth? by Sandra Markle
Grade K to 3
Chameleons Are Cool: The Camouflage Myth, Corrected
Chameleons Are Cool: Read and Wonder by Martin Jenkins
Grade K to 3
Browse every book we have written about by age, by kind of book and by subject: Find the right book for your child. Or see the whole Stealth Science shelf.
