Chick

Children's Literature - Susie Wilde

Lodestar has a nonfiction preschool series that excites with beautiful color photographs and drawings and has just enough text to teach without overwhelming. Chick is one title in the "See How They Grow" series that shows how baby animals develop.

School Library Journal

PreS-Gr 3-- The ``Eyewitness'' (Knopf) format is utilized to look at two animal infants. Crisp, clean, full-color photographs on snow-white pages follow the birth and early development (6-8 weeks) of a chick and a rabbit. Informative and effective photos show mothers protecting and feeding their young, conveying the vulnerability of the newborns. The first-person text lets readers know just how and when the simple learning processes unfold. Because of the white backgrounds, the animals are not in their natural settings, and are pristine clean. The last page of each book reviews the photographic record of growth. Watercolor borders soften the artificial tidiness of the page layout. Ronald Fisher's Cottontails (1989) and Jane McCauley's Baby Birds and How They Grow (1983, both National Geographic) are broader in scope with similar photos, but set in nature. --Jacqueline Elsner, Athens Regional Lib . , GA