Prehistoric Actual Size

my seven-year-old son loves non-fiction. we gifted this book to his kindergarten class a year ago. it's amazing as is "Actual Size" which has a Gorilla on the cover and includes animals that are more current. The pictures are fabulous!

In this crazed topsy-turvey world, it's always nice to have something to hold on to. Like the fact that small children are obsessed with dinosaurs, for example. Year after year, babies are born, mature, and grow into bright-eyed preschoolers who shriek continually for just one thing: DINOSAUR BOOKS!!!!! There are worse things in the world. As a children's librarian I see new dino books all the time and usually they're so dull and rote that it's all I can do to keep from falling asleep as I process them. Now about a year ago I had the good fortune to stumble across Steven Jenkins' brilliant, "Actual Size". Cunningly playing on a child's need to interact with a non-fiction title, Jenkins created gorgeous pictures of large and small animals from around the globe at their actual size. Sometimes only a single eye of a critter would fill a page. Other times, you could fit a tiny monkey within the palm of the smallest hand. "Prehistoric Actual Size" takes the already grand idea of giving us life-sized cut-out illustrations and mixes in the already existing need for dinosaurs, ancient gigantic millipedes, terror birds, and other animals that no longer exist today. And how the children now wish that they did. The book knows who its audience it. It gently shows a tiny morgan's tooth that's a mere 4-inches-long on the title page. From this tiny mammal (an ancestor, one might wonder) we turn the page and find ourselves staring at a particularly malevolent Velociraptor (with feathers, no less). Serving the kiddies exactly what they want right from the start allows Jenkins to insert little-known prehistoric goodies alongside the better known. A tiny protozoan the size of a period in this sentence stands beside a sea scorpion of 2 meters or so. Kids will meet creatures they've never even heard of, like the flightless and eight foot tall terror bird that ran as fast as a modern horse. Or the rabbit-like Epigaulus with horns and long claws to match. By the end they'll have gone close to a baryonyx's foot and counted the sharp teeth in a dinocephalosaurus' mouth. It makes, I can tell you, for riveting reading. It occurs to me now that if you had a kid that was mighty slow in learning his or her measurements, "Prehistoric Actual Size" (and its predecessor, for that matter) might fall into the category of "godsend". Think about it. Each illustration of a creature in this book comes with a small bit of text underneath the image explaining how large the creature was. Let's say you want to teach kids their inches. Just open the book up to the picture of the Saltopus and point out that this smallest of dinosaurs was a mere 24 inches long. In the case of the Velociraptor, a measuring stick could be laid out on top of the book on the ground and an adult could show a kid just how long 6 feet really are. Kids can imagine the dinosaur reposing on the ground, only its maliciously toothy face visible from the book's pages. Math teachers should sit