Book Review: Hiders Seekers Finders Keepers

December 31, 2024 by Sarah White Leave a Comment

After I wrote the other day all about hibernating animals, I came across another book that would be fun for a unit study on hibernation or animals in the winter.

Hiders Seekers Finders Keepers: How Animals Adapt in Winter by Jessica Kulekjian and Salini Perera shows different animals getting ready for winter. The hiders are animals like turtles, frogs, bees, chipmunks, bears, snakes and bugs, and the book shows all of them in the places and ways they like to spend wither, with a couple of sentences about each. For example we learn that carpenter ants make a substance called glycerol, which helps prevent them from freezanimals like squirrels that hide a future feast, or foxes who grow a warmer coat for winter.

The book includes lovely illustrations that show a dad anding.

Meanwhile the seekers like geese, elk and mule deer move around to find a better place to spend the winter. Of course butterflies and lots of other birds and insects do this, too. Keepers are daughter walking through the winter forest. In the end they find rabbit tracks, and there’s a guide to different animal tracks in the snow in the back of the book. There are also resources for further reading, documentaries to watch and websites to visit to learn more about the different animals featured in the book and how they get through the winter.

There is a lot of detail in the illustrations that can keep you talking beyond the facts on the page. Kids will have fun noticing animals that are hiding and what’s going on in the background of drawings.

This book is pretty, short but full of facts that will interest the animal lovers in your classroom or home and shows many different ways that animals can prepare for winter.

About the book: 32 pages, hardcover. Published 2022 by Kids Can Press, suggested retail price $19.99

[Photo: Kids Can Press]

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Book Review: Borders

My brother went through a phase where he was obsessed with maps. He loved to look at maps and he would draw maps of places real and imagined. He even drew maps that followed our route when we’d go to visit our grandparents in another state!

I assume there are still kids who go through map phases, and kids with an interest in history and how things got to be the way they are. Both kinds of kids will enjoy the book Borders: Understanding the Lines that Unite and Separate Us by Karim Ressouni-Demigneux, with illustrations by Karine Maincent.

The book describes how the original borders were natural, such as oceans, rivers, mountains and deserts, and while some of those borders are still in use today, many borders are human made, decided by treaties or carved out by colonizers. It covers the history of people congregating in one place and how city-states evolved into empires, how maps are drawn and how human conflicts can reshape borders.

There are stories about walls that reinforce borders, how borders work in the air and at sea, how people cross borders with passports or as refugees and how climate change is altering the borders of some countries.

You’ll also learn some fun border facts like the fact that if you stand in the middle of the bridge over the Zambezi River you can be in four countries at once because that’s where the borders of Botswana, Zambia, Namibia and Zimbabwe meet. Or how there is only one border crossing between India and Pakistan that’s closed each night in an elaborate ceremony.

The book talks about time zones, border towns and places where countries and parts of countries are inside other countries and places where borders are less important such as the European Union.

While there are serious subjects in the book, it’s still a fun read that’s sure to interest those kids around ages 8-12 who like travel, maps and weird but true facts.

About the book: 72 pages, hardcover, published 2026 by Blue Dot Kids Press. Suggested retail price $21.95.

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