Animals Do The Strangest Things

Describes the peculiar and strange habits of 19 animals.

Simple text looks at the animal kingdom's youngest and most adorable members features unlikely pairings to demonstrate what makes different animals unique.

Describes nineteen animals that have peculiar and strange characteristics, including the platypus which has poison spurs on its legs, the opossum which fools its enemies by pretending to be dead, and the bat which navigates by built-in sonar.

Describes nineteen insects that have peculiar and strange characteristics, such as the camouflage of the walking stick, the driver ants that prefer people to picnics, and the bugs that row themselves like boats on the water's surface.

A wonderfully weird book about the strangest creatures in the sea. A feathery tutu dancing through the water? A tiptoeing rock wearing a wig? Not everything is as it seems in this fascinating exploration of bizarre sea animals. Each creature is introduced with intriguing art and text, and the question, “Am I the strangest thing in the sea?” Open the gatefold, and the actual creature in its habitat and a full description appear, along with the answer: No, it’s not the strangest thing in the sea. That is, until the last creature, which is the strangest. But what could it be? What’s cooler than bizarre things that are real? Kids will want to dive right in!

“Do you like to dance?” asks the first spread of this book. “Honeybees do, too!” responds the next. In a rhythmic, question-and-answer style, children are introduced to seven playful activities that they share with other animals. Expanding on the science is a brief explanation of what the animals are actually doing and why — for them, it’s not all fun and games! Join gazelles, gray tree frogs, marmosets and more as they play tag, blow bubbles and even get piggyback rides! Who knew our animal friends were so much like us?

"Introduces the reader to a wealth of extraordinary life forms"-- P. [4] of cover.

In the late 1950s, Ted Geisel took on the challenge of creating a book using only 250 unique first-grade words, something that aspiring readers would have both the ability and the desire to read. The result was an unlikely children’s classic, The Cat in the Hat. But Geisel didn’t stop there. Using The Cat in the Hat as a template, he teamed with Helen Geisel and Phyllis Cerf to create Beginner Books, a whole new category of readers that combined research-based literacy practices with the logical insanity of Dr. Seuss. The books were an enormous success, giving the world such authors and illustrators as P. D. Eastman, Roy McKie, and Stan and Jan Berenstain, and beloved bestsellers such as Are You My Mother?; Go, Dog. Go!; Put Me in the Zoo; and Green Eggs and Ham. The story of Beginner Books—and Ted Geisel’s role as “president, policymaker, and editor” of the line for thirty years—has been told briefly in various biographies of Dr. Seuss, but I Can Read It All by Myself: The Beginner Books Story presents it in full detail for the first time. Drawn from archival research and dozens of brand-new interviews, I Can Read It All by Myself explores the origins, philosophies, and operations of Beginner Books from The Cat in the Hat in 1957 to 2019’s A Skunk in My Bunk, and reveals the often-fascinating lives of the writers and illustrators who created them.