A Cool Summer Tail (Common Core & Science)

Just like humans, animals have to keep cool during the overwhelmingly hot summer season. To keep cool, animals grow new hair, lick their skin, migrate to cooler places, hide in especially leafy trees, and even bury themselves in piles of mud. In this book different animal children ask their mothers how humans keep cool, and at the same time they show how the animals themselves keep cool while the sun beats down, all in easy-to-read, rhythmic, rhyming poetry. Finally, at the end of the book a young human boy asks his mother what animals do to keep cool during the scorching summer days.

This book’s illustrations are very realistic and life-like, and the pages at the end of the book give some interesting extra background information. I found the sketches that illustrate humans doing things that animals would usually do funny, but I think I would have like this book better if I had been younger. I would recommend this book for a read-aloud for Pre-K to K, and an independent read for 1st to 2nd grade.