Howl Like a Wolf! Learn About 13 Wild Animals and Explore Their Lives Through Creative Play and Activities

Howl Like a Wolf! was originally published in 2018, but back then the book’s subtitle read Learn to Think, Move, and Act Like 15 Amazing Animals. This paperback edition essentially repeats the contents of the 2018 version while deleting two entries, those of the North American beaver and the white-tailed deer.

Howl Like a Wolf! is a combination information and activity book in which readers are introduced to 13 different living creatures and then are invited to mimic some of the behaviours that are typical of that creature. Included in the book are: gray wolf, emperor penguin, African elephant, little brown bat, giant Pacific octopus, diamondback rattlesnake, great bowerbird, leopard, humpback whale, Western honeybee, common raven, striped skunk, and the Columbia spotted frog. Each chapter title indicates its activity focus, and so youngsters will be called upon to “SNEAK like a LEOPARD” or “DANCE like a HONEYBEE” or “SPRAY like a SKUNK”.

The chapters are divided into two parts (see Excerpt) with the first being factual information about the “animal” that is related in the first person by the animal, itself. This section also contains third person fact boxes which provide additional information about the animal. In “HOWL like a WOLF”, for example, a text box headed “WHAT BIG TEETH YOU HAVE!” describes, in part, the differences between a wolf’s teeth and those of a pet dog.

The second part of each chapter, written in second person, provides the activities in which the reader can become involved in order to act like the chapter’s animal. The activities flow directly from the directions that appear at the beginning of this section. For instance, in the “KEEP COOL like an ELEPHANT” chapter, this section is introduced by:

Now you be an elephant!

Your elephant mission is to use your nose and ears to keep cool and your powerful memory to keep track of all your herd members. Put on your thinking cap!

Youngsters are then invited to use a garden hose as a pretend trunk, to make elephant-ear fans, and to play a memory game. Yale also throws some fact boxes into the activities section. In this case, in a box headed “WHO’S THAT HANDSOME FACE?”, readers are informed: “Elephants are one of only a few animals who can recognize their own reflections in a mirror?”

The chapters are either six pages or four pages in length, with the pages being equally divided between the information and activity content. Each chapter is introduced by McKean’s full-page illustration of the focal animal, and more of her illustrations appear throughout the chapter to support the fact boxes or the suggested activities.

In the 2018 version of the book, the closing page had provided the URL for a website from which youngsters or adults could download patterns for masks of 13 of the book’s 15 critters (no octopus or whale). The idea behind the masks was that children’s wearing the appropriate mask while carrying out some of the suggested activities could add to the book’s facts and fun. In the new version, pop-out masks for 11 of the animals (still no octopus or whale) are printed on heavy glossy stock over the book’s closing 15 unnumbered pages. While some masks, like those for the honeybee and the skunk, require nothing more than adding an elastic, others, such as that for the raven and the elephant (which consumes four pages), do require further assembly. For those needing additional masks, the URL found in the 2018 book is still active.

In selecting her content, Yale has chosen both familiar and unfamiliar wild animals. Her use of the first person in the information section and the second person in the activity portion will be effective in engaging readers. Some readers may choose to read only the book’s factual portions while teachers might select particular animals and activities to support curricular needs. Kindergarten teachers and parents of preschoolers might also want to look at the activities to see if they could incorporate some of them into their classrooms or homes. Howl Like a Wolf! would make a fine personal purchase while the consumable nature of a portion of the book will call for institutional purchasers to decide how they are going to deal with that part of the book.