Reviewed by Tracy Alley
Teacher & Coordinator of Gifted Programs, Madeira City Schools & Adjunct Professor for the University of Cincinnati
“Like you, animals need to sleep.” This is how this delightful picture book begins. Children from preschool through elementary will enjoy the information found within the pages of the creatively illustrated and well–written book about how animals sleep.
The torn and cut–paper collage illustrations will engage children. The fascinating facts on each page will keep them turning the pages to find out more—a hairy armadillo sleeping more than twenty hours a day or a parrotfish producing a nightly mucus cocoon to hide its scent from predators.
In the main text, there is only one fact about each of the seventeen animals; however, the appendix provides an informative paragraph about each animal mentioned. This would be a nice book for research reports or a read–aloud. Steve Jenkins has been producing quality and award–winning children’s nonfiction for many years. He and his wife, Robin Page, collaborate on their books with help from their three children. They have an extensive home library which they use daily to aid in their writing and illustrating. They visit museums, zoos, and aquariums to hunt for more information to utilize in their books.
As a teacher, I have all of their books in my classroom library. My students enjoy them immensely. I would highly recommend Time to Sleep as well as the other two books in the series, Time to Eat, and Time for a Bath. Kids will relate human behavior with animal behavior and never forget some of the cool, gross, amazing, and disturbing things they will discover about animals!
Review posted on 6/27/2012
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