How Many Ways Can You Catch a Fly?

From the award-winning authors of What Do You Do With a Tail Like This? comes How Many Ways Can You Catch a Fly? by Steve Jenkins and Robin Page. This is a beautiful book about the various ways animals do the same thing. The book is divided into six "how many ways can you..." sections: snare a fish, hatch an egg, use a leaf, catch a fly, dig a hole, and eat a clam. The pages shows several different animals methods for each of the tasks through a sentence about the animal's technique. The torn paper collage illustration method makes the animals somehow beautiful and realistic, not to mention adorable in their endeavors. The layout is simple and crisp, which deviates from the too crowded pages that are often in children's nonfiction books. At the end of the book, the authors include a page with more information about each of the animals included in the book. 

The animal featured on the cover, I found out, is the slender loris from southern India and Sri Lanka. The slender loris "moves slowly and carefully through the branches but can react quickly to snatch an insect or to avoid a snake," according to the information page at the back of the book. I loved the collage of the slender loris as he sneaks up on the fly on the page. I went looking for more pictures to see if these animals are just as adorable in real life. Turns out that they are! Also, according to Animal Planet and the International Union for Conservation of Nature, they are endangered by deforestation http://animal.discovery.com/guides/endangered/mammals/slender-loris.html. To learn more about the adorable slender loris and many other animals, read How Many Ways Can You Catch a Fly? and then do your own research. This could be an excellent research project lead in for students, as well.