You Can't Taste a Pickle With Your Ear

You Can't Taste A Pickle With Your Ear

Author: Harriet Ziefert

Illustrator: Amanda Haley

Genre: Nonfiction

Major Awards: None

Grade Level: 1-5

Summary: This book takes the reader through each of the five senses throughout five different chapters. In the introduction it talks about the senses and why they are important to our lives. It talks about how it helps us know about the world around us and how they can warn us if we are in danger. At the end of each chapter it has activities and questions for the reader to answer, such as "What smells good to you? What smells icky?" At the end of the book there is a conclusion about how we use our senses and how our brains work with our bodies to tell us information. It also has a cute poem at the end to help children learn to appreciate their senses.

Evaluation: I absolutely love this book about the five senses! It is one of the best ones I've seen that actually does a good job at getting the reader interested. It continually captures the reader's attention because of the illustrations and probing questions. I will definitely have this book in my classroom one day.

Because this book has very good information, but is also accompanied by fun illustrations that help make sense of the content, it really does have the ability to reach children in a wide range of grades. It is silly, but does not fail to get the point across.

This book is obviously perfect to pair with a unit on the five senses. Because it is broken into chapters, it would be nice to work on one sense each day and read the related chapter to the class. It could also be used for research if the class did a project about the five senses.