Common Critters: The Wildlife in Your Neighborhood

Book excerpt: Common Critters celebrates neighborhood wildlife in verse. A familiar cast of characters—worms, slugs, caterpillars, ladybugs, robins, mourning doves, houseflies, spiders, squirrels, skunks, and others—crawls, runs, buzzes, and flits through these lively poems, which show how exotic these seemingly ordinary creatures really are. Dan Tavis’s humorous illustrations crank up the delight, and a child wanting to learn more will find it in the natural-history backmatter. Pat Brisson employs a variety of verse forms in the book, and she shows how it’s done in a back-of-book feature called “A Peek into the Poet’s Toolkit.” Common Critters is a three-tool STEAM book with delightful reading, natural history, and language skills rolled into one.