Why did the chicken cross the road? To follow you home! Learn all about a not-so-basic bird in this delightful nonfiction picture book.
What’s that? A chicken followed you home? Now what do you do?
Celebrated author-illustrator Robin Page leads a step-by-step, question-and-answer-style journey through the world of chickens. Along the way you’ll explore different breeds, discover different types of coops, and learn everything there is to know about chicken reproduction and hatching.
Gorgeous, playful, and filled with facts, this engaging nonfiction picture book shines new light on a very familiar fowl!
Sure,kids may know what to do with a stray puppy or kitten, but what if a chickenfollows them home? Page treats this appealing fictional problem, helpfullygiving audiences answers to some basic questions (“What kind of chicken isit?”), providing information on chickens and their care, highlighting a few ofthe many breeds, and very briefly covering such topics as food, safety andshelter, gender identification, egg laying, and chick raising. Furtherinformation on chicken history, physical traits, and a chick’s developmentinside the egg, as well as a short list of resources and websites, areappended. The information given here isn’t detailed enough to set a kid up as achicken farmer, but it’s a concise and inviting introduction to chickens, andthe “chicken followed me home” premise is an amusing angle. The layout anddigital illustrations (rendered in Photoshop) are simple, with rich,marbleized-looking reds and blacks stunningly creating the plumage of thetagalong chicken (a Rhode Island Red hen). Large figures and clean compositionswith plenty of white space make this great for group sharing, while the brieftext, clear fonts, and simple vocabulary will put this within readalone rangefor older primary-graders as well. Families considering embarking on thebackyard poultry movement or classrooms raising chicks would want to supplementthis with more detailed resources, but as a very first introduction to chickensand their care it would be hard to beat this. In addition, its brevity,striking artwork, and question/answer format will make it a winner with thestorytime crowd.
