Through the Looking Glass Children's Book Reviews
Sleepy Snoozy Cozy Coozy: A Book of Animal Beds
Illustrator: Michael Glenn Monroe
Nonfiction Picture Book
For ages 5 to 7
Sleeping Bear Press, 2015 ISBN: 978-1585369089
In the animal kingdom animals sleep in a wide variety of beds. Not many of these beds resemble the beds we humans choose to sleep on, but to animals their nests, burrows, and other sleeping places are as cozy to them as our beds are to us.
When we look at an eagle’s nest it is a “sticky twiggy,” “Picky pokey” affair made of branches and twigs, and it is lined with moss, leaves, grass and feathers. They are the biggest nests found in the bird kingdom and eagles often return to the same nest year after year to raise their young.
Crayfish have a very different kind of bed in their watery home. Hiding under a rock they often sleep lying on their sides and they hold onto a rock or mud with one of their ten legs so that they don’t float away. A hermit crab, which is related to the crayfish, has a much more permanent bed inside the shell that it carries around with it. Hermit crabs exchange their borrowed shells for a bigger or smaller one as needed.
Like the crayfish, moose sleep wherever they happen to be as dusk falls. Dolphins do the same thing, but because they are mammals that need to breathe air they do something very odd indeed. Only half of a dolphin’s brain and only one eye goes to sleep at a time. The half of the brain that is awake is the half that remembers that the dolphin needs to go to the surface to breathe. After about two hours the sleeping side of the dolphin’s brain wakes up and changes places with the side that was awake.
In this fact packed book, charming illustrations are paired with wonderfully descriptive poems and sections of informative text. The poems are full of descriptive words that give the reader a sense of what each animal bed is like. The accompanying text offers up interesting details about each of the animal species that are featured.
Children will learn about a wide variety of animal beds, and will appreciate that to each animal, their bed is just perfect, even though we would probably not be happy if we had to sleep in an eagle’s nest, a desert fox’s burrow, or in a beaver’s lodge.
