Dinosaur Cousins?

Rating:
Summary: great book
Review: I am a teacher, and use this book in the classroom. I feel it does a good job of explaining things in a kid way. It promotes creative problem solving, and imagination. It is in terms the students can relate to. My students loved this book and so do I.

Rating:
Summary: Awesome
Review: I am a teacher, and use this book in the classroom. I feel it does a good job of explaining things in a kid way. It promotes creative problem solving, and imagination. It is in terms the students can relate to. My students loved this book and so do I.

Rating:
Summary: great book
Review: My 4 year old son loves this book. I've found very few books
about dinosaurs that are on his level. This one is perfect. It
has concrete information about different dinosaurs and compares
them to familiar animals, and there are no gory pictures. I'd
highly recommend it for this age level.

Rating:
Summary: The size of Dinosaurs
Review: My son is almost 3 and a dinosaur lover but he didn't understand why he couldn't see them in the zoo. I explained they lived long ago and this book helped him relate to the size and shape of dinosaurs by comparing them to animals he has seen. It really works!

Rating:
Summary: Charmingly Illustrated Book, But Possibly Counter-Productive
Review: There really isn't too much to find fault with in this cute little book. The illustrations are quite charming and it's focus on the fantastic notion of modern-day animals as dinosaur "cousins" is really quite sweet, if a bit naive. I thought that some of the dinosaur/modern animal associations were a bit far-fetched (baby chicks and protosauruses?), but if there's any real fault to be found, it's in the concept of the pairings themselves.

Because of its numerous scientific facts about dinosaurs, I was afraid that younger children might take the fantasy-based idea that contemporary creatures might be their "cousins" for as much of a fact as the rest of the text. I think, however, that that's a very minor point.

All-in-all, it's a very sweet book that indulges fantasies while encouraging children to see similarities in diparate objects. It even manages to include a lot of scientific facts about dinosaurs. It's most certainly a fun book for many different ages.