If you have a bookworm who loves animals, or a class of creature experts, then this is the book for you. Each page is dripping with wonderful creature illustrations. You can spend hours poring over each page, making new discoveries and finding hidden fauna. Ella Bailey has created a wonderful book for adventurers to explore.

So let’s venture in…

The end pages! Wow! The glorious end pages. Fantastic illustrations and a brilliant bank of information. These are great just to look over and enjoy, but they spark off lots of ideas for reading and writing to me. It’ll make more sense if I refer to them as we go through the book, so that’s what I’ll do.

Our day in the rainforest begins with our tour guide and main character, the young black spider monkey. Already we can begin to refer back to those end pages. What creatures can you spot in the background? ‘Find and copy’ their name. Are they ‘up high’ or ‘down below’ in the rainforest?

You know I relish a book to book link, so when I spy the collective noun ‘troop’, I just want to hop books to an animal collective noun beauty. This could support writing, adding to vocabulary, or just be for fun.

A Pandemonium of Parrots has a short verse about each collective, packed with nice verb choices and animal behaviours. These would give great ideas for writing those extra details.

As we move through the rainforest with the spider monkey, he introduces us to a vast array of creatures. Another chance to skim and scan. What can you see? Can you find….? All the while linking back to those end pages.

Distracted by all the wonderful sights, the monkey loses his mother. The detailed illustrations draw readers’ eyes across the page, searching for her. What a wonderful scene to describe. The end pages are the most stunning word bank, now. At this point, I may refer readers to other non-fiction books to discover more about the movements, behaviours or sounds of the creatures that are of interest. These would all help writers to describe the scene. Children may choose to write a description in the third person; a first person recount or diary entry as the spider monkey; or a twist on the tale as another creature lost from their mum.

The young spider monkey continues through the rainforest as the day passes on, looking for his mother. As he does, we get to discover more creatures and find out a little more about the rainforest. There are plenty of great vocabulary choices and a nice smattering of SPaG content to pause at (if you wish!)

Then, just as danger arrives, mum returns to rescue her boy.

As night falls, he returns to the troop and sleeps with his mother, safe and sound, ready to face another day in the rainforest tomorrow.

I love this book and will most definitely be getting the previous two in the series: Antarctic and Savannah.

One Day on our Blue Planet …in the Rainforest is published by Flying Eye Books.

I hope this has been useful. Please shout out with any questions or suggestions.

@Mrs_iPad_W – Your resident Reading Rocker