The Complete Book of Animals (The Complete Book Series)

By addebook • Jul 2nd, 2008 • Category: Biology •

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The Complete Book of Animals (The Complete Book Series)

The Complete Book of Animals (The Complete Book Series)
By School Specialty Publishing

Publisher: American Education Publishing
Number Of Pages: 352
Publication Date: 2000-11-28
ISBN-10 / ASIN: 156189544X
ISBN-13 / EAN: 9781561895441
Binding: Paperback

The Complete Book of Animals is designed for grades 1-3 to teach children basic information on animals with classroom-tested activities.

This 352 page workbook provides motivating lessons that guide children from basic to advanced concepts about all different types of animals. Including a complete answer key this workbook features a user friendly format perfect for browsing, research, and review!

Over 4 million in print! The best-selling Complete Book series offers a full complement of instruction, activities, and information about a single topic or subject area. Containing over 30 titles and encompassing preschool to grade 8 this series helps children succeed in every subject area!

Summary: Excellent life-science “textbook”
Rating: 5

I use this book almost as a textbook to homeschool my first-grader in the life sciences. We decided to concentrate on animals this semester and this book works very well on its own or teamed with a science encyclopedia/school text. It has just enough information to engage a child without being too wordy and the colorful pictures are a real plus! I love the Complete Book series and already own more than 5 including the Math Games, Spanish and Question&Answer titles and I am so glad I purchased the Animals title too. Truly well planned for busy moms like me!

Summary: great for homeschoolers!
Rating: 5

I am a Homeschooling Mom of two boys (1st grade) and we love this book! They each have their own copy and it is a great way to teach not only about the animals but also about writing. We also use this as reading comprehension work. On day 1 of the material, I read out loud to them and they underline key phrases and words. Day 2, they read it out loud to me. It has been a great resource for us to teach them “researching”. The questions are straight from the text and teaches them the basics for answering question using complete sentences. I highly recommend this book.

Summary: A disjointed and error-riddled collection of mini-papers seeming written by average sixth graders
Rating: 2

This book got two stars rather than one because the bright illustrations are engaging and delightful and some of the factoids will delight animal-focused children.

However, the score is very low for a number of reasons.

First, the errors. Some are outright and ridiculous. Butterfly caterpillars make “cacoons” rather than crysalises. the jellyfish page has a a picture of a Portuguese man-of-war–which is a completely unrelated colony of animals that float at the surface without conscious propulsion. One exercise tells the child to label the below-water storage room in a beaver lodge…but there is no storage room in the illustration! Orcas are CORRECTLY identified as dolphins under the dolphin pullout book…but then they are placed in the whale pullout book, too. Now, it is true that dolphins are a family within the same sub-order of Cetaceans…but this is needlessly confusing for an elementary-level book. Lichens are identified as plants. They are NOT. The text confidently declares that “lemmings always migrate in a straight direction, crossing anything in their path,” which is the source of the old wives’ tale of lemming. Nonsense. There was a reference to metamorphosis, but the authors present incomplete metamorphosis as if it isn’t metamorphosis at all. Apparently, they didn’t understand their middle school life science very well. These are just the mistakes I noticed without doing any error-checking.

Second, there is the disorganization of the book. The schizophrentic framework organizes the animals by region–North America, Central and South America, Australia, and Africa (apparently, there are no animals in Europe…)–AND by habitat–Animals that live in the water–AND by class–reptiles and insects–AND by human interaction–farm animals and favorite pets–WITH “Science and Animals” and “Animal Facts and Fun”. The choices for placement are arbitrary and clumsy. Within any one section, all animals are organized in alphabetical order, which is a senseless non-choice and insures that there is no logic or connection between the individual animals whatsoever.

Third, there is the lack of thought in the choice of material presented. The individual one-page essays seem to be written by a sixth grader who waited until the last moment to complete an assignment to “write three paragraphs about animal X”. There is no plan to present important concepts in the biological science in a methodical way. Any term that is incidentally referenced is defined every time–usually badly–and is never built upon. Instead, random and often relatively insignificant and dull, dull, dull facts are collected and laid out, followed by thoughtless questions aimed at triggering mindless regurgitation of what was just read. The author will tell you the range of weight of the animal, will list all its major food sources, will tell you the number of babies it has, its gestation time, the time until weaning and adulthood. Considering the limits of the space, who cares? Why not give an ACCURATE portrayal of the wolf pack–discussing BOTH position of the alpha male AND female and the beta male and female, how only the alpha female (and sometimes beta female…) has pups, how the parallel male-female ranks work, etc, instead of telling me HOW MANY babies they have. Why not explain that jellyfish aren’t fish and introduce the concept of chordates/animals with backbones. There are so many possibilities…wasted in pointless trivia!

This book could have been facinating. Instead, it is a terrible disappointment.

Summary: Great book
Rating: 4

This is a wonderful book to have around the house. You can find information on many types of animals such as the Bald Eagle, Chinchilla, Sloth Bear, and African Elepant. You can also use this book to help make a geography lesson more interesting. The book has a section for each continent along with sections such as Science and Animals, Favorite Pets, and Farm Animals.

Summary: They’ve done it again
Rating: 5

As with the other books in this series, the publisher has done it again. A thorough, engaging, and educational book!

Free download Links

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