#1 What Do You Do With a Tail Like This? by Steve Jenkins & Robin Page

What Do You Do With a Tail Like This? was a Caldecott Honor Award Winning Book in 2004. Within this book the reader is shown a group of five similar body parts-noses, ears, tails, feet and mouths-and asked to guess which animal each belongs to. In Language class, we were discussions predictions and the various methods to make a prediction about something. At the beginning of the lesson some students found it difficult to make predictions, so at that moment I introduced this book. After reading the book to 22 second graders it was interesting to hear their predictions of each animal.

The authors, Steve Jenkins and Robin Page, did a phenomenal job with the illustrations of the animals. The answers are on the following page with a picture of the whole animal and a brief description of how each animal uses that body part in a slightly different way. I thought it was very creative that they used the last four pages of the book for additional notes on each animal.

This is definitely a book that I have always noticed in the bookstore and wondered what it was about. A colleague had the book in her classroom library and I asked to borrow the book so I could solve the mystery. After reading the book I absolutely knew this was a book designed for all children; male or female. I thoroughly enjoyed the book so much that I decided to buy a copy of the book for my classroom.