Actual Size  by Steve Jenkins (2004)

    A fun book with animals (or parts of animals) drawn life-sized; for example, an atlas moth takes up most of one page, while the dwarf goby is a speck on the accompanying page, and the eyeball of a giant squid takes up one and a half pages of a 2-page spread!  This book has a short sentence giving basic information about the animal pictures, such as "the Goliath birdeater tarantula is big enough to catch and eat birds and small mammals," along with basic size information such as length and weight.

    To introduce this book, you can start out by reading a story with one of the animals featured in the book (a frog, a crocodile, an elephant are pretty ubiquitous in children's picture books) and after reading and discussing that book, point out how small the animal is in the pictures.  Ask if that is how big the animal really is, and have the children demonstrate how big the animal is in real life, or actual size.  Then tell them the next book you will be reading is filled with pictures of animals the size they are in real life - or at least as much of the animal as they could fit on the page.

    This book is great sharing several skills with preschoolers:  Print Awareness, due to the sparse amount of text and the bolded text contained in the short sentences, Vocabulary due to the new animals that are introduce in the book and for Print Motivation due to its capacity for drawing children into the book - they can compare their head-size to the eye of a giant squid, hold up their arm to see if it is as long as a saltwater crocodile's mouth (it is!) and compare their hand-size to the tooth of a great white shark. 

    As a parent message, I said, "books that hold a child's interest and keep them asking questions are great for Print Motivation, which is getting your child interested in books!"

- Natasha Forrester