Bug Detective: Amazing Facts, Myths, and Quirks of Nature

Gr 1–3—This title mimics its buggy subjects by spreading factoids and illustrations around the page. Tiny text scuttles and curls under clear headings and around fantastical mini-illustrations: shoe-shopping centipedes, garbage-collecting beetles, and ladybugs in a rocket ship. Kids will love the suggested projects on each spread, which include searching for walking sticks and butterflies hidden in the images and looking beyond the pages into their own world to study a fly's eyes or a spider's web. The final spread, "Bug Detective Activities," sums everything up and offers suggestions for going on a bug hunt, building a worm farm, and holding a race between a worm and a snail. Thankfully, all instructions remind readers to set their new bug friends free once the activity is completed. With so many small things to see, this book is suited best for one-on-one sharing and is a natural to pair with Angela DiTerlizzi's Some Bugs (S. & S., 2014).