My children are fascinated with animals. The snow over the past week or so gave us what seemed the perfect opportunity to explore an arctic animal: The Polar Bear.
Smart Kids Productions recently sent us this book:
It's a story of a baby polar bear looking for food with his mother and pesky brother. It's a cute book with great illustrations, and held my children's attention (they've read it independently several times since then, as well. Though the book itself is pretty short (31 pages with just a few sentences on each page), the "My Animal Family" line doesn't end with just the book. Inside the cover is a clear pouch containing a DVD with BBC footage of polar bears accompanying another short video story. There are also "fun facts about polar bears" and a song to learn that contains even more facts.
Here are the descriptions from the company of the book:
Nanuq: A Baby Polar Bear’s Story. This beautifully illustrated book is written with care. The story is about how Nanuq saves his bossy brother from a foolish mistake. The book will give you an opportunity to talk to your child about home, life, family—and animals.
and the DVD:
Nanuq’s Family Story. The book also includes a live action DVD that features award-winning BBC wildlife video footage. Carefully edited for young children, the footage will give your child a glimpse into the reality of Nanuq’s challenge of growing up in the North Pole and how he helps his family survive and thrive in that harsh environment.
And to drive the learning home even further, the book also contains a membership card for an online environment at My Animal Family related to the animal in your book (in this case, obviously, an icy world fit for a cartoony polar bear.) Within that world, there are opportunities to test your knowledge of polar bears (one-question multiple-choice quizzes are found throughout), as well as earn points by playing games (puzzles, math problems, etc) that can be used to by virtual gear for your little explorer. One "plus" security-wise is that it's just you in this little world - your children aren't interacting with other kids (or imposters) out there. They are safely in their own environment. Your child can customize their explorer's clothes, hair, facial features, etc to make it look just like themselves, but it appears you can only create one explorer for your account, so in our case, with 4 children using it, we had to just make a Gideon character. But they don't seem to mind. There is also a coloring section with coloring pages, paint by numbers, dot-to-dots, matching games and more. It's geared more to a younger crowd (ages 4-8), but there are multiple difficulty levels on each game, so even the bigger kids were enjoying themselves.
The books retail for $12.99 each, with the DVD and 30 days of online access included. (Though right now I see they are running a special of 20% off!) Besides Nanuq the baby polar bear, they also currently have books about Ella the baby elephant, Leo the baby lion, Korow the baby chimpanzee, and Tahi the baby dolphin appears to be an option, though that book doesn't seem to be available for purchase from their site right now. The also offer membership plans to extend your online experience.
To continue our study we watched a few more videos online about polar bears and used a kids' drawing book to learn to draw polar bears. At the end of the week they made a final drawing in their journals and listed 5 facts they'd learned about polar bears. But truly, the Nanuq book and video was a great intro. It's highly likely we'll buy another if it coincides with a topic we are studying.
Disclaimer: I was provided a free copy of this product in exchange for my honest review. I have not been compensated in any other way.
