Dinothesaurus

Dinothesaurus

Dinothesaurus

Written and illustrated by: Douglas Florian

Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2009

39 pages

Poetry Book

This poetry book is all about dinosaurs. Brachiosaurus, Plesiosaurs, Triceratops, and Spinosaurus are just a few of the poems in the book. I like this book because it is very informative and fun to read at the same time. I learned a lot about dinosaurs while reading this book.

Florian used gouache, collage, colored pencils, stencils, dinosaur dust, and rubber stamps on primed brown paper bags for the illustrations in this book. The text for this book is set in Sabon LT and while it is written in poetry form, it is placed informally in the book. Some parts of the poems are bold, italic, big, little, spaced out, and some of the letters are even written backwards. The color in the book is different on every page. The colors range from the cool end of the spectrum to the warm end of the spectrum. The illustrations look like you could reach out and touch the spikes on the Ankylosaurus or the wings on the Pterosaurs. The collage background on page 24 really makes the Deinonychus stand out on the page.

This book would be more appropriate for older children just because of the harder vocabulary. In the science classroom students can learn about different types of dinosaurs and in the Language Arts classroom students can write their own poem about dinosaurs. This book could also have an art lesson to go along with it. Students can learn about different types of art and create their own illustration for the poem they wrote. In the back of this book there is a “Glossarysaurus” that tells about each dinosaur included in the book and goes more in depth about each one. There is also a list of dinosaur museums and fossil sites. This would be a good unit to study and then take a field trip to a museum to actually see the dinosaurs up close.

Dinothesaurus has been nominated for several awards and it has received starred reviews in four major publications. Florian is a winner of the Gryphon Award and a Parents Magazine Best Book of the Year Award. This is definitely a book I would use in my classroom.