A row of these sit on our shelf and they are all built the same way. One animal to a spread, a photograph of the real thing using the body part on the left, a cartoon of a child wearing the same equipment on the right, and a short paragraph in between. Sandra Markle writes them. They cost about five dollars and they take ten minutes.
This is the one that started it, and if you only ever buy one of them, buy this one.
The science it actually teaches
There is a single idea underneath the whole book and it is a good one: the shape of a tooth tells you what the animal eats. Everything else in there is a worked example of that.
The beaver is the clearest. Its front teeth never stop growing, and gnawing wears them back to a chisel edge about as fast as they come in, so a beaver that stopped chewing would be in trouble from its own mouth. The great white carries rows of teeth that move forward as the front ones snap off, which means losing them is not an accident for a shark, it is the design. A crocodile grips and holds and does not chew at all. A rattlesnake's fangs are not eating tools either, they are hollow and they fold back out of the way, which makes them a delivery system with a hinge in it. The narwhal's tusk is one long tooth growing out through the lip, and it is one of the very few teeth in the animal world with no job at mealtimes. The naked mole rat keeps its teeth outside its lips so it can dig with them without filling its mouth with dirt.
Now the honest part, and it is true of every one of them. Each of those is a paragraph. This is a browsing book, not a lesson. It hands your child a fact and a picture and turns the page, and it never once takes a mechanism apart. If what you want is the book that teaches how a tooth is built and why enamel is on the outside, this is not it, and none of them are.
What makes this particular one worth the five dollars anyway is where it ends, which is your child's own mouth. Every idea in the book can be checked with a tongue. There are three shapes in there: flat blades at the front for cutting, points at the corners for tearing, wide bumpy ones at the back for grinding. That is the beaver, the shark and the elephant, all inside one seven year old's head. No other book in this series lets a child run the test on themselves, and that is the difference between a fact your child was told and a fact your child confirmed.
The child it lands with
Four to seven is the sweet spot, and the child it hits hardest is the one who is currently losing teeth. That is not a coincidence and Markle plainly knows it. A six year old with a gap in the front of their face already has a live question about teeth, and this book walks straight into it holding a narwhal.
A third grader will finish it in ten minutes and may feel talked down to. Buy it for the younger one. The older one will read it over their shoulder, which is what happens with these books anyway.
One place to stop and talk
Put the book face down on the last animal, before the part about brushing. Have your child run a tongue along their own teeth and count how many different shapes are in there. The answer is three. Then go back through the book and match each shape to the animal that took it to an extreme.
That is the entire science of the book, done by a six year old, in about four minutes, using no equipment.
What to know going in
This is a gentle book, and it is worth saying out loud why that is worth saying. Nothing dies in it and nothing chases anything. The teeth belong to predators, though, so somewhere in there is a wide open great white mouth and a crocodile photographed close, in full color, at the size of your hand. A small number of five year olds do not want that at bedtime. If you have one of those, look at those two spreads yourself before the book gets into the house.
Two other things. The store bands it K to 3 and the top of that band is generous, so treat it as a book for the youngest reader in the house and a freebie for anyone older. And it closes on a reminder to look after your own teeth, which is a health message rather than a science one. Most parents will be glad of it. If you would rather your child's reading were not doing that job, you should know it is in there before it arrives.
Where to get it
It is $4.99 at What If You Had Animal Teeth?, and the advice is to buy this one on its own rather than the row. The rest of them are on the Stealth Science shelf and the joke is identical in every one, so a child either takes to the format or does not, and you will know inside a week. If it takes, the next one to buy is Animal Feet, because feet are the part your child can watch doing a job every time the dog crosses the kitchen. If it does not take, you are out five dollars instead of a whole shelf.
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
What If You Had an Animal Tail? The Best Page Is Last
What If You Had an Animal Tail? 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.
