Do Lizards Eat Ice Cream? How Animals Beat the Heat

Do Lizards Eat Ice Cream? How Animals Beat the Heat, a companion book to Do Frogs Drink Hot Chocolate? How Animals Keep Warm, is a fun way to teach children about interesting animal adaptations, and it gives them an opportunity to interact with the book by framing each fact with a preceding question for the child to answer. After the first couple of questions, listeners will begin to think more deeply about the questions and analyze whether or not the animal, in fact, could do what the question is asking (in a roundabout way!) For example, one of the questions is whether or not squirrels carry umbrellas. While the obvious answer is no, further thought and analysis might lead listeners to think, “Yes”; in fact, squirrels can and do carry umbrellas in the form of their long, bushy tails which they can curl above their heads to block them from the hot sun!

Do Lizards Eat Ice Cream? reads slightly more like a fictional children’s picture book rather than a traditional nonfiction book. It does not carry the expected nonfiction text features, such as table of contents, index, photos, diagrams, captions, sidebars, index, or glossary. As a result of these lacking features,Do Lizards Eat Ice Cream? works well as a read-aloud to students as long as you choose not to show them the pictures while you are reading aloud to them. If the reader faces the picture towards the audience while reading the book, the listeners will immediately know what the answer is to the question as the question and answer are on facing pages. This book might have benefitted from presenting the question on the recto and then forcing readers to turn the page to get the answer which would have allowed for more prediction and inferencing opportunities.

Jenna Piechota’s pictures are simple, cartoon-like drawings of cute and quirky looking animals presented on primarily solid coloured backgrounds. Her drawings include modern and everyday references that students will love spotting, such as ‘Antcraft’ (a video game that ants are playing), refrigerators in a starfish’s home, and rock band alligators. The illustrations are funny enough to make students giggle, yet straightforward enough to convey the question and answer and not to be too distracting from the information that the book carries. Piechota complements Kaner’s writing well, which is also very straightforward and would be accessible by strong grade three readers and up. However, even younger readers should be able to use the picture clues to figure out the questions and understand the ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answers, even though they may need help deciphering the slightly more difficult explanations for the answers.

While an all-around solid and worthwhile book, Do Lizards Eat Ice Cream? missed the mark in a couple of areas. A glossary, or defining words on the same pages, would have been a much-welcomed addition and would have allowed for additional learning to be built into the book. There is some vocabulary, such as saliva, evaporates, glands, blood vessels, prepare, and surrounding, that may be new to younger readers and, therefore, pose a problem for pronunciation and comprehension. These would be great build-ins for Science and/or English units. Additionally, as mentioned earlier, the reading of this book might have been enhanced by a change of layout to pose the question on one page and the answer on a different page to build some suspense and allow for discussion in between question and answer. Nonetheless, Do Lizards Eat Ice Cream? How Animals Beat the Heat is a worthwhile book to read and may keep younger readers coming back time and time again until they memorize all of it the facts.