Home > Categories > Books > Kids - General > One Little Fantail review
Meet New Zealand's beautiful birds, from the friendly fantail to the playful kea and the morepork, wide awake at night. Anne Hunter's delightful rhyming story introduces young readers to a number of New Zealand birds, named in both English and Maori, and beautifully illustrated by Dave Gunson.
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I was so wrapped to get this book to review, with two young children and also being a teacher for under fives its a great way to learn about all the NZ native birds that some actually get forgotten about.
The book is very easy to follow and the illustrations done by Dave Gunson are just amazing, they look like the real things. The Author of this story Anne Hunter has done a great job, I found myself almost singing this book not just a read it out it is great at rhyming and to be honest I enjoyed the book as well as my 3 year old son. He would point out the things on the birds like Kahu (Harrier hawk) golden eyes as I read it in the book, he was loving it. The birds are drawn in their habitat.
I also love how the Maori name of the birds are in the book, the main part of the reading and the English word is there as well but in the background around the picture along with the Maori word too. This makes it easy to teach the children the correct words for the birds and giving it a go with the name is good, and giving them the English name is great as well
Now there are 11 NZ native birds in this book and the last three pages are great information for parents to teach their children, it gives you the Maori and English name once again for the bird and then it gives you bullet points under that of information about the bird for example:
Kea are the only parrots in the world that live in snowy environment.
If you want to learn more about the Kea and other native birds in NZ such as the Kiwi, Pukeko, Ruru (morepork, owl) then you need to get this book, its lots of fun and yup fully rereadable, you can learn something each time you read it. Information will sink in more and more you read.
I think this book is fabulous and so did my son. It is so beautifully illustrated with the life like paintings of New Zealand's native birds they are so well done they almost look life like and I would happily put some of the pictures in a frame on the wall.
The book introduces children to a wide selection of Native Birds including the Kiwi, the fantail, and the Tui. My son loves watching the birds in our garden so this really appealed to him. We have a bird bath in our garden and a little bird house that we will put bread or seeds out for the birds. We quite often have fantails and tui's out in the garden which my son will sit and watch. We also quite frequently hear the calls of the Morepork at night when it is dark.
The book has a beautiful rhyming story introducing each bird and their habits, so you get a snippet of information about each bird too. It uses both the English and Maori words for the birds which I was glad of because some of them I didn't know the bird but then on the page it would give the English word and then in would click, I didn't know the Morepork was called a Ruru in Maori.
The final three pages give a few bulleted pieces of information about each bird to further help children learn about these amazing birds so that is really cool that that is included. I would say this book is a must have for Kiwi Kids and would make a great present for a young reader.
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