Super Small, Miniature Marvels of the Natural World is big poetic STEM     

STEM and poetry are two things that early elementary illustrated readers don’t see too much of. They see lots of illustrated books on cute topics that softly teach morals or lessons. In those books, there might be rhyming words or stanzas, but it’s not what educators would cast as poetry. The same can be said for the infrequency of non-fiction illustrated books in that there aren’t many of them. Super Small, Miniature Marvels of the Natural World seeks to bridge that gap, by doing so in an improbable combination.

Super Small combines poetry, and it’s easily recognizable with lines that are made up of three to five words. Every other line might rhyme, sometimes it’s every fourth line, but there’s a definite rhyming scheme happening in the book that defines the genre that kids spend their entire academic time avoiding. Poetry, check.

But then, when you look at the far right column or at the bottom fourth of the pages you’ll see the same animal featured on the main stage. They’ve got a couple of smaller panels that highlight a superpower that makes this critter unique, it’s the ‘Marvel’ that was referenced in the book’s title. In this case, it works as an adjective about the animal’s abilities, as well as, alluding to the movies and their super people.

In those panels, the story plays out more like a conversation with the animals talking directly to the audience about what they can do. The Black-Footed Cat is bragging that it weighs 200 times less than a lion, but is able to catch prey at a much more successful rate, making it the most lethal hunter in the feline family. We meet the Diabolical Ironclad Beetle, who tells young readers that its power is the ability to not be crushed. First, yes that is the insect’s real name, and it can be run over by a car and still survive. And to be clear, at 1 inch long, it’s big enough to be able to be squished, but has a shell that makes it one of the toughest things in nature.

I had to research that last bug too, just to ensure that I wasn’t being pranked by an illustrated book or that there weren’t a couple of pages on cryptozoology thrown in the mix. The Immortal Jellyfish, commonly called in the scientific community as Turritopsis dohrnii has the ability to cheat death. Literally, every time this tiny jellyfish reaches puberty it regenerates itself back to being a baby, like a self-regenerating Baby Groot who can will itself to be a baby simply by getting younger. In theory, this little dude could live forever, but it can still be eaten by predators (which don’t absorb their abilities, unfortunately).

It’s stories like that one that makes Super Small a really fun read-aloud book to kids at storytime or when bedtime can be in a state of flux. This is a great thing because this illustrated book is loaded with them. If your audience is really enjoying the stories and aren’t too manic then you can read a couple more of them as bedtime is nigh. Because the pages are short, it only takes a minute to read each page. Because the illustrations are humorous and present the animals as creatures with special powers, the kids will enjoy having them read to them. It’s a big, cyclical world where kids have fun, they read, they have fun, they dig into poetry, the see some STEM and everybody involved wins or gets smarter.

Super Small, Miniature Marvels of the Natural World is by Tiffany Stone, with illustrations by Ashley Spires, and available on Greystone Kids.

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