Awards

Reviews

This book will open students’ eyes to the community of animals they can find in an old log. From mites to salamanders to daddy longlegs, this minihabitat is teeming with life.

— Learning Magazine (Back-to-School 2011)

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Field trip! What excitement for children to anticipate new discoveries in nature and have fun while learning. Author Anthony D. Fredericks creates enchanting rhythms and rhymes accompanied by Jennifer DiRubbio’s realistic, sometimes larger-than- life paintings and spreads in this remarkable guide, Around One Log: Chipmunks, Spiders, and Creepy Insiders. The result is an intriguing, yet accessibke way to learn about nature’s cycles, decomposition, and the reemergence of new life.

With an opening letter to the book’s visitors, Roly-poly, a balled up buddy—a gray, rounded, small land creature—begins the thrilling lesson with an overview. He describes what happens when a flourishing, giant oak tree is struck by lightning and then blown down by wind. The roly-poly, sometimes called a doodle-bug, tells about the predator and the prey, the big and the small, and the decaying tree which becomes a wonderful
home for them.

Long soaking rains seeped into some spaces;
Wide patches of moss spread over these places.
Over time the great tree slowly wasted away;
The once mighty trunk began to decay.

Young readers discover a busy community in astonishing arrays of insects that find a home in the rotting log site. Ants, worms, millipedes, crickets, and beetles scamper about; termites chew on the wood; a scared salamander hides beneath it. A garter snake slithers around. A chipmunk twitters and squeaks. Like a children’s repeating song, the rhyme builds and repeats as each colorful spread reveals another type of insect or animal that benefits from living in the dead oak tree.

Some daddy longlegs, like alien creatures,
Have thin spindly legs and other strange features.
They creep past the mites—a hundred or so;
Swarming over the log, on top and below.
They live with the snake in search of some prey
Who slithers and slides for most of the day.

In the back of the book are informative Field Notes with descriptions, definitions, and “Fantastic Facts” about the dead oak tree, its process of decay, and the animals that take up residence in it, thereby giving it new purpose. The final section of this marvelous book, a field trip taken indoors, is a section titled “Activities, Projects, and Lots of Cool Ideas!” These suggestions will provide still more enjoyable occupation Around One Log. The book is described as juvenile literature, but adults will also be enamored of its timeless message of ecology.

— ForeWord Magazine – Mary Popham (March 2011)

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Around One Log: Chipmunks, Spiders, and Creepy Insiders is a rhyming children’s picturebook about the amazing variety of animals that populate a supposedly dead and rotting log. Beautiful, realistic color illustrations show a yellow-and-black salamander that feeds on the termites eating the wood; a garter snake that slithers by; daddy longlegs spiders; a spry chipmunk; and more. The repeating rhythm of the rhyme drives home the point about how interconnected the web of animal life is. “Year after year the log continued to rot, / Then a class on a walk came up to this spot. / One student – she asked, to her teacher she said- / ‘Is this log alive? Or is it now dead?’” Around One Log is an excellent read-aloud storybook with a strong environmental theme. Highly recommended.

— Midwest Book Review (May 2011)