And So They Build #12
Bert Kitchen

Kitchen, Bert. (1993). And so they build. Cambridge: Candlewick.

Grade Level: 2-6

Awards: Young Readers Choice Award; Caldecott Award; A Child Magazine Best Holiday Gift Book; An American Bookseller Pick of the Lists

Standards: Life Science (animals, habitats, behavior, habits, plants)

Content Area: Science

Genre: Informational

Author’s Credibility: Bert has written many children books that have won several awards. He has been fascinated with animals and how they build their homes since he was a child. He is also the illustrator of the book and has been illustrating children books since 1993.

Illustrations: He used watercolor and gouache for the illustrations.

Access Features: Notes to parents and teachers; author’s note

Summary: This book is one in a series of two that Bert Kitchen has written. In this one, he writes about animals and how they build their habitats. He discusses how twelve animals such as birds, wasps, spiders and caddis flies build their homes instinctly.

Writing Style: The text is very clear and organized, in that it basically follows the same format for each page. He puts the text about the animal’s lifestyle and how it builds its home on the left side of the book. On the opposite page, there is a full-page illustration of the animal and its habitat. Bert leads the children into the book by beginning each page with big and bold text of a sentence about why the animal builds his habitat. The rest of the page is done in smaller text.

Response: This is a good lead-in book on animals and their habitats. The text is big enough for young readers to enjoy and not get tire. The illustrations are nice, big, and colorful, which make for easy viewing as a read-aloud. Because some children are so timid about drawing their own pictures, this would be a good book to use for tracing. I would use this book with my science unit on animals’ habitats. I could also use it with math unit on shapes since the book is talking about architectural designs.

Science Processes: Observing, classifying, inferring, and predicting.

Related Books: Somewhere Today and When Hunger Calls, Bert Kitchens.