Snack, Snooze, Skedaddle: How Animals Get Ready for Winter

In Snack, Snooze, Skedaddle: How Animals Get Ready For Winter, readers will learn how a dozen creatures prepare for, and then survive, winter. In turn, author Laura Purdie Salas introduces the behaviors of: hummingbirds, monarch butterflies, blue whales, earthworms, chipmunks, black bears, Northern wood frogs, garter snakes, field mice, moose, red foxes and humans. Each animal is treated via a pair of facing pages with one page’s text and illustration telling/showing what it does in the fall and the second revealing how it deals with winter. For instance, a hummingbird is shown drinking nectar from snapdragons in the fall and then eating “delectable tropical flies” while overwintering in southern lands. In the fall, the black bear “gobbles up acorns and beechnuts” before hibernating in its den over the winter months.

The book’s main text consists of rhyming couplets, and, after the book’s opening pair of pages, the text for each creature consists of a single couplet, with one line dealing with the fall preparation and the second the winter response. The two lines of text for the earthworm read:

Vacuum dead leaves like a superslow sweeper.
Forget going south. Just wiggle down deeper!”

Claudine Gévry’s cartoon-like illustration accompanying the first text line shows a worm with its head above ground, pulling leaf matter into its hole while the second line’s artwork finds the earthworm well below the now snow-covered ground. To the “winter” page of each entry, Salas adds another line of text that is printed in a smaller font. This sentence clarifies how the “critter” spends its winter. Concerning the aforementioned earthworm, Salas writes: “As soil freezes, this earthworm burrows down below the layer of frozen ground.”

If Snack, Snooze, Skedaddle: How Animals Get Ready For Winter had stopped after it dealt with the dozen creatures, its content would have likely limited its audience to preschoolers and grade oners; however, the author has added two short information sections containing subject matter that would appeal to older readers with better reading skills. In the first, a one-pager, “Three Survival Strategies”, Salas details the three major approaches to survive winter: migrate, hibernate or tolerate. In the second information section, “Amazing Survivors!”, Salas uses two pages to slot the book’s creatures into migrators, hibernators or tolerators and adds additional details about each creatures specific behaviors. A 22 item glossary closes out Snack, Snooze, Skedaddle.

As either a recreational read or as content in a science class, Snack, Snooze, Skedaddle: How Animals Get Ready For Winter is a worthy school or public library purchase.