A great gift for children in your life

Zoobooks make a great gift for a child interested in animals and wildlife. Each (monthly) issue features a different group of animals ("alligators and crocodiles," "elephants," "dolphins and porpoises" and so forth). I have subscribed a young relative to this magazine for several years, and she loves it. I also subscribed to it myself when I was a child. For more information, go to

http://www.zoobooks.com/

The drawings are clear and bright, the text is easy to read and
interesting to a kid. It is educational and entertaining. It is also one of the few child's magazines that is devoted exclusively to *wild animals.*

"Ranger Rick," another favorite, deals more with wildlife and ecology in general, and comes on stronger on conservation issues.

INCLUDES:

* attractive drawings of the different species. Some of the different themes for the drawings:

- living and extinct animals, all next to each other for scale.
- the animal in its current natural habitat
- the animal in motion
- a first pass at anatomy: the animal without its for, the animal without its skin (just muscles), then the animal's skeleton. All in lifelike poses so it does not look like a taxidermy specimen. These were some of my favorite drawings as a child... I used the bulges I saw on the skeletons to add realistic shadows to my own drawings of animals.
- Range maps of its distribution. These give the child a first pass at biogeography.

* Engaging, accurate, but easy-to-read text. Zoobooks is packed with good, child-sized information about many levels of the animal's biology, and sometimes about that animal's conservation, but it does not beat the child over the head with the message.

* Zoobooks does a good job integrating pictures and text. It is never just a square picture with a chunk of indigestible text next to it. Instead, each double page is a coherent, complex layout. The entire area of the page is colorful. Friendly, odd shaped paragraphs of text are placed creatively near the picture of interest. Zoobooks is just fun to look at.

* No advertising.

AGE

This magazine is geared for the 8-12 age range (beginning and middle readers).

COST

Moderately expensive: list price is $30 for a year's subscription (12 issues), but you can find if fof $19.95. Their website has if for $25.