Hatch! written and illustrated by Roxie Munro (Marshall Cavendish, 2011)
Don’t let the five-letter title splashed across eggs and a duckling on the cover lead you to think this book is small. The oversized picture book will spread nicely across laps or hold up well in story hour, where children will enjoy the guessing game structure. With every turn of a page, we see an egg — plain, spotted, white, or colored — and are given clues about who might be in it. The following pages are sure to be pored over with detailed illustrations of the bird, its family, and habitat, including images of nests and suggestions of food sources and predators. Of course it’s a great book for spring, but can be used anytime to learn about varieties of birds from around the world: birds that we learn can be much taller than a person, or fit in a palm, or which can fly eight miles high or migrate 25,000 miles in a year. Readers interested in learning even more about incubation, parenting styles, flight, and birdcalls can use the bibliography and glossary (“fun bird words to learn”) in the back.
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