By Anne Schreiber
Page-size National Geographic shark photos with sentences short enough for a child a year or two into reading, and a fact to collect on nearly every spread.
Real sharks, not a story. A big National Geographic photograph fills every page, and the sentences underneath are short enough for a child a year or two into reading. It walks through how a shark is built to hunt, how its teeth fall out and grow back its whole life, and how wildly the sizes vary: a whale shark runs as long as a bus while some kinds would fit in your hand. Great whites, hammerheads, the strange flat-headed ones. Fact boxes and pulled-out vocabulary words hand the hard words over instead of letting a new reader trip on them.
A shark-obsessed child will sit with a shark book longer than they'll sit with anything you pick, and that's the whole idea. It's a Level 2 reader, pitched around the end of second grade, so the sentences are short and the type is big, but a full-page photo of a great white does not read like homework. Your child reads it to find out about sharks, and the reading practice happens without anybody calling it that. It's part of a long leveled series too, so there's more waiting once this one clicks.