Slugs, Bugs, and Salamanders: Discovering Animals in Your Garden
by Sally Kneidel Illustrated by Anna-Maria Crum
If you're not fond of slugs and bugs, you'll be pleased to learn that salamanders help control them in your garden, while lizards will wolf down aphids, flies, and caterpillars. Includes sections on helpful and harmful plant-eaters, predators of plant-eaters, and the decomposers.
ISBN 1-55591-313-X All ages
8-1/2 x 11, 128 pages; b/w illustrations
$16.95 paperback
Gardening isn't ordinarily a topic that inspires gasps of delight in young readers. Ask most kids what they think about gardening and they'll tell you it's an interest that has something to do with retirement and free time (in other words, "My grandma likes it, but hey, she's old."). Hand those same reluctant kids a copy of Dr. Sally Kneidel's thoughtful new book Slugs, Bugs and Salamanders: Discovering Animals in Your Garden and the first thing that sprouts may just be a new environmental perspective.
Dr. Kneidel has dedicated her professional life to educating young people as a science resource teacher and author. She has used her hands-on experience to make Slugs, Bugs and Salamanders an inside look at how young people can play an active part. "This book describes a garden especially for children," she says. "But this is a garden not just of plants. It's an animal garden too! You'll learn how to attract the ones [animals] that are beautiful, how to make homes for the ones that are helpful, and how to discourage those that are a pest."
Because Dr. Kneidel focuses on plants with kid-appeal everything from cherry tomato plants and sweet peas that can be nibbled right off the stalks, to flowers that draw butterflies and hummingbirds for observationshe manages to bring the idea of gardening down to a basic level kids can understand. Slugs, Bugs and Salamanders transforms ordinary kids into environmental stewards; creators of habitat, feeders of small animal kingdoms. With that kind of power dangled as incentive, what kids could possibly resist?
Kelly Milner Halls Kids Read for the Book Report
