What a beautiful book, with visually appealing illustrations that demonstrate how patterns and shapes are all around us. The poems are short and long, rhyming and non-rhyming, written in stanzas and written in circles. This book would lend itself to art lessons, math lessons, and walking field trips to be in and explore the wonder that is nature.

Bees, Snails, and Peacock Tails

I liked the book, Bees, Snails, and Peacock Tails, by Betsy Franco and Steve Jenkins. The big idea of this book is the natural patterns and shapes that are found in nature. The animals and insects are beautifully illustrated with life-like colors and focus on their symmetrical patterns. The bees make hexagonal hives and the mice make tracks with two small footprints in the front and two larger footprints in the back. The other aspect of the book that I enjoyed was the way that author placed the words on the pages around the animal or insect. This made the story interesting and pleasing to the eye. The snail’s description is written in a spiral and the spider’s description follows the outline of the spider’s web. ( )

These poems can be incorporated with studying shapes in class and the information page in the back is helpful.

Summary: A poetic telling of how animals have certain patterns or make certain shapes.

Genre: Informational, poetry.

Critique: This is a good example of informational text because there are a lot of interesting true facts about animals in this book. I would also say it's poetry because it is written with meter and rhyme.

Theme: Don't be afraid to explore nature for shapes and patterns.

Media: Collage

Bees, Snails, and Peacock is filled with Mathmatical aspects, shapes and patterns that are connected with nature. The ryhmes that are being used in this book can help children make the connection with picture of the animal and words that relate to math. After doing a math lesson dealing with shapes, I would read them this book, so children can have another gateway of understanding the material. I would then ask them to pair up into groups and look for shapes in the classroom that are in the same shapes in the book and draw it down on a sheet of paper then disuss this to our class.