Home > Categories > Books > Kids - Preschool > 8: An Animal Alphabet review
Explore the animal world, from aardvark to zebu!
Discover hundreds of animals, great and small. Lion and lizard, whale and wombat. Learn one wild fact about each animal. (Did you know that gorillas yawn when they are nervous?) Look carefully, because for each letter of the alphabet, one animal is pictured eight times. Why 8? Come inside and find out.
Product reviews...
8: An Animal Alphabet has a page dedicated to each letter of the Alphabet, I love it! It is going to be great for helping Mr Three recognize letters and also great to help Mr Seven to learn about animals. Above and beyond that it will also be a great "Lear to Count" tool with a challenge set at the start of the book to find one animal that is featured on a page 8 times, it is different on each page. The fact that the featured animal were not all the same for example for letter "F" the animal is a frog, there are green frogs and brown frogs. This makes it more challenging which is great.
There are animals featured in the book my kids have never heard of such as an Abalone, Booby a Falcon so we had fun looking these up and learning about each one. Once we reached the end of the book we were surprised and delighted to find facts about each animal in the book. We learnt new things such as the fact that a Starfish can loose an arm and it will grow right back!
The kids all loved this book and so did Mum!
I have a five year old daughter that is crazy about animals and facts so a book that helps teach the letters of the alphabet as well as learn about animals would have been perfect for her last year. Now she has been at school for six months she knows all the letters but still really enjoyed 8: An Animal Alphabet for all the other things it has to offer.
In this book there is a page devoted to each letter of the alphabet. It has the common animals you would expect along with some I had never heard of. I was grateful for the glossary at the back of the book that helped me to identify the more obscure ones. The glossary also had an interesting fact about each animal. It certainly taught me several new things.
The 8 part of the title refers to the fact there are 8 of one type of animal on the page. This isn't an identical illustrated repeated on the page which is what the children looked for at first. On the L page there were 8 lions but a few had manes, others without as well as cubs. On the F page their were different species of frogs. I thought this was very well done as it encouraged the children to think about the animals.
This book has it all. It teaches the alphabet, counting, identifying animals and facts. It is aimed for an international market with its wide range of animals. It even includes New Zealand natives the kakapo and the kiwi which we were delighted to see especially given the author/illustrator Elisha Cooper lives in New York.
This is a great book that my 5 year old has returned to many times in the few weeks we have had it. I have also shared it with three 4 year olds that I have for homebased childcare and that have asked for it again and again. The illustrations are beautiful and it makes a great gift or book to share with any young child. It is a book that you can read from cover to cover or just read your favourite page. For this reason it will be one I would take with me to share with my daughter while we kill time in a waiting room or on a flight.
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