Feathered Dinosaurs of China by Gregory Wenzel (1 book)

Wenzel, Gregory. (2004). Illustrated by Gregory Wenzel. Feathered dinosaurs of
China. Watertown, MA: Charlesbridge Publishing. 32 pages.
ISBN # 1-57091-561-X

Awards:
Outstanding Science Trade Books for Students K-12, 2005
Children’s Book Award, Notable Book, 2005

Genre: informational

Content area: science

Grade level: K-5

Credibility of author: The author gives thanks to Dr. Peter Dodson, Professor of Anatomy and Professor of Earth and Environmental Science, University of Pennsylvania.

Summary: This book discusses the discovery of feathered dinosaur fossils in China from the Early Cretaceous Period. It describes and illustrates various dinosaurs that were covered in feathers. It presents evidence to support that modern birds are feathered dinosaurs.

Standards: Life Science IV (Archaeology, Anthropology, and Paleontology)

Illustrations: Almost every other page is a full-page illustration with smaller illustrations on corresponding pages. The illustrations are done in acrylics on paper.

Text: Approximately every other page has anywhere from 5-15 lines of text. The text type set is printed in Adobe Goudy and the display text set is in Amigo.

Text structure: descriptive

Tone: The author uses a narrative tone that is both informative as well as entertaining when he discusses what daily life was like for these feathered dinosaurs.

Voice: The author leads the reader to ponder the evidence left behind, including over 100 similarities found in birds and dinosaurs.

Language: There is varying sentence length with descriptive language.

Access features: author’s note, glossary/index combination

Use: I would use this book as a read aloud for younger children and independent reading/research for older children. There are some really good, descriptive sentences that teachers could have fun with while reading aloud. This book could be used for a unit of study on dinosaurs and/or birds. There are numerous examples of metric units used to describe the size of different animals throughout the book. This could easily be integrated into math.

Response: The illustrations and descriptive language in this book play important roles in helping the reader to make the connection between dinosaurs and birds. The author is very thorough in his descriptions, including characteristics such as their size, how they walked, ate, etc. It is a very interesting book that adults can learn from as well as children.

Related text:
How Dinosaurs Took Flight: Fossils, Science, What We Think We Know, and Mysteries Yet Unsolved by Christopher Sloan