Through the Looking Glass Children's Book Reviews
1-2-3 Dinosaurs Bite! A Prehistoric Counting Book
Nonfiction Board Book
For ages 4 to 6
Sterling, 2012 ISBN: 978-1402777226
Just like animals today, dinosaurs were browsers or predators or scavengers. They had to look for or hunt for their food, and they had to have teeth to eat the food they preferred. In short, dinosaurs were biters!
In this very clever novelty board book Steve Jenkins offers children a wonderful way to practice their numbers and to learn about dinosaurs and colors at the same time.
We begin our journey with a Microraptor, which swoops across the page, its beautiful green feathers splayed and its mouth, full of lots of small teeth, wide open. The Microraptor takes “1 bite” out of the page. Further along in the book a bipedal Dilophosaurus, with its tail curled and its talons sharp, races across the pages and it takes “3 bites” out of the page.
By the time we get to the “Terrible Tyrannosaurus” mother and her little baby, our pages have five bites marks in them. Clearly we need to be careful where we put out fingers because “these dinosaurs bite!”
At the back of the book Steve Jenkins provides readers with more information about the five dinosaur species featured in the book, and then he challenges children to use their counting and search-and-find skills further.
