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Author: Robert F. Baldwin Illustrator: Don Dyen
Retail Price: Paperback • $8.95 | Hardback • $16.95 Parents and elementary science teachers alike will appreciate the way the marine food chain comes to light in this lighthearted book. The heroes are “plankton, floating free, zillions of creatures alive in the sea, making their food from the light of the sun that shines on the sea that feeds us.” The plankton feeds the shrimp which feeds bass, a “fish with a hungry look what saw the shrimp, but not the hook.” And on up the food chain to the girl with a sandy pail, each verse introduces a new link and then connects it to everything else. Among the verses are interspersed factual statements about the ocean’s food web, enhancing the value of this book for science teachers as well as language arts teachers. |
- International Reading Association Teachers’ Choices Award
- Parent Council Ltd. Outstanding Selection
— Prof. David Sobel, Antioch New England
Co-Director of the Center for Place-based Education
From the delightful opening verse of this poetic nonfiction book, the reader learns the important concept that plankton is the first link in the ocean food chain. The rhyming text continues and covers each link – the shrimp who eats the plankton, the sea bass who eats the shrimp and the humans who catch the sea bass for dinner. . . . This is a wonderful resource for studies on ocean plankton, habitats, and food chains. Using the book as a model, students could research their own topic, write poetry to explain it, and include sidebars of facts and figures.
— The Reading Teacher – Teacher’s Choices for 1999
A lively and very attractive travelogue, in verse, about the life under the sea. Baldwin is a nature writer who’s spent a lifetime on the water and who has a nice way with a phrase – “The roaring wind and the booming gale/thrilled the girl with the sandy pail/who caught the shrimp as small as a snail. . .”
The illustrations by nature artist Don Dyen are terrific – full-page, in warm tones with plenty of informational detail. This is a neat book to stuff in the backpack on the way to the shore with the kids
— Newark Star-Ledger
