This is a great comprehensive planner for exploring "yard bugs." It is sometimes hard for kids to get past an innate fear of bugs. But books like this make it just a little bit easier.

This is a great platform for a school year classroom project, while still remaining totally accessible to the individual, backyard explorer.

The illustrations are well rounded and balanced. The format of the book makes it approachable in a way that many non-fiction books are not. The format also lends it self to the child revisiting the same pages over and over as they look at specific items within a page set. ( )

I was delighted to find this DK press book at a neighboring library while I was browsing. I recently bought two gardening/outdoor books from DK, Ready Set Grow and Wildlife Gardening and they're both very popular!

This book focuses specifically on keeping bugs as pets. I have a few books on this subject, but this is the best one I've seen, ever! There's a quick little introduction to the idea of keeping bugs as pets, spreads on the equipment and materials you'll need, and then we plunge right into...the bugs! Each featured bug has a spread of information about the bug, including detailed photographs, identification of species, and where to find them, then the next page has all the instructions you need for capture, housing, and care.

The featured bugs include wood lice (or pillbugs, or roly-polys, as we called them), slugs & snails, aphids, caterpillers, worms, earwigs, ladybugs, spiders, crickets & katydids, pseudoscorpions, mosquito larvae, dragonfly larvae, and backswimmers. I was disappointed not to see mantises, which were a favorite bug pet when I was a kid, but I believe they can be difficult to find and are not as common as the bugs listed here. I was happy to see cockroaches were not listed. I do not like cockroaches. At all.

Like all DK books, every page is packed full of information, photographs, ideas, projects, and illustrations. This particular volume has the fun addition of little word balloons here and there to add a few giggles. There's also a detailed index and a very clear page of contents.

Source: Library
Verdict: Highly recommended! Weed your old bugs-in-a-jar books and buy a couple copies of this excellent volume instead. Perfect for summer messy crafts projects as well as everyday research and bug keeping.

Nick Baker, star of the Science Channel's Weird Creatures with Nick Baker, has teamed up with DK to create Bug Zoo, an in-depth guide to observing, and/or capturing and cultivating some of our most common insects - aphids, caterpillars and earwigs, to name a few.

Armed with "Zoo Tools," simple things that a family will likely have on hand, , Baker walks the reader through the process of deciding what to keep (wolf spiders - yes, garden spiders - no, their webs are too big), how to catch it, where to keep it (an earwiggery, a mollusk mansion, a katydid crib), what to feed it, and why it's a cool creature. Did you know that ladybugs are red to "advertise how poisonous or foul-tasting they are"? If you pick one up, it may ooze a foul-smelling, yellow liquid on your hand!

Icons help to identify sections in the book. The "hand" icon is for fun activities - like tagging snails!

"To keep track of individuals, mark their shells with a permanent marker or dots of nail polish... Then go out at night with a flashlight and plot their positions on a map of your yard. How far do they wander? Do they return home?"

In addition to icons, there are numerous sidebars, margin sketches, word bubbles, arrows, and as in most DK books, many excellent photographs. A table of contents and index make this an easy book to browse.

Bug Zoo - a fun way to connect with neighborhood nature. For ages 7 and up.
http://www.shelf-employed.blogspot.com ( )