What Do You Do With a Tail Like This? and more by Steve Jenkins

What Do You Do With a Tail Like This? by Steve Jenkins and Robin Page
2004 Caldecott Honor

Big and Little by Steve Jenkins

What Do You Do When Someone Wants to Eat You?  by Steve Jenkins

I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE this author illustrator. Since I also have environmental education in my bag of tricks, I have a particular appreciation for these books that convey fascinating information about animals together with beautiful paper cut collages made from hand painted water colored paper. Luscious combination!

The illustrations remind me a little of Eric Carle, these are also paper cut collages, but the papers used for the collages are more delicate--- water colored and hand made paper, and the results are a little more refined. (Make no mistake I love Eric Carle!)

What Do You Do With a Tail Like This? talks about unusual animal body parts. Noses of platypuses, elephants, star nosed moles, hyenas, and alligators. Ears, tails, eyes, feet, mouths of an array of other animals. The format gives close ups of the featured body parts first, and then you turn the page to learn more. That way you can guess at what's going on before turning the page. I like a book that is interactive that way. At the end of the book there is more information about each animal. I love it when facts are so amazing they read like poetry. . . . "The platypus closes it's eyes under water and uses its sensitive bill to detect the faint electric pulses emitted by its prey." Or "The entire human body has more than 600 muscles, but there are as many as 100,000 muscles in an elephant's trunk."

What Do You Do When Someone Wants to Eat You?   Introduces us to 14 animals peculiar defense mechanisms. "The blue-tongued skink startles attackers. . . by sticking out it's large, bright blue tonuge and wiggling it from side to side." Or, "The basilisk lizard is known in South America as the Jesus Christ lizard. It can escape it's enemies. . .  by running across the surface of ponds and streams, using its large feet and great speed to keep it from sinking into the water."

Again the wonderful paper cut illustration and "wow" inspiring fascinating facts!

Big and Little is about animals that are related to one another but very different in size. The animals are illustrated to scale for comparison (one inch equals 8 inches). "The capybara, the world's largest rodent, weighs as much as one thousand deer mice." OK, I'm totally a sucker for this kind of thing. I love it.

He also has a page of silouettes that are at the scale of one inch equals two and a half feet. With a human being included to compare all the animals at once. And there is a couple of pages of additional information about each animal. I always find this "additional information" to be really interesting, but also hard to get through for some reason and I wonder how many young readers actually get to read it. My kids never have the patience for that kind of thing!

Anyhow, I can totally recommend this author illustrator and look forward to seeking out more of his books! Plus I'll be sharing these with my outdoor explorer campers tomorrow!