Like No Other, illustrated animal book magic for elementary school

Ask an upper-elementary student to do a report on something and they’ll pick the strangest, creepiest, most uncommon one in the book. They might determine who they’ll research by how gross their name is, how ugly they are or how remote their habitat is, thus Brazilian Spitting Death Spider Monkeys of the word unite. Like No Other: Earth’s Coolest One-Of-A-Kind Creatures is an illustrated book for middle-elementary ages through lower-middle school that’s mostly creepy and not too much common.

The know-it-all kids (see: most students in fifth-grade) who have seen Like No Other are snarkily saying “but I already knew about the walrus, platypus and whale shark, they’re common.” Yes and that’s where you have to put on your big brain and dig into the meaning of the book’s subtitle. Earth’s Coolest One-Of-A-Kind Creatures and its meaning is clearly spelled out on the first page of the book. This book has one-of-a-kind creatures in that the ones showcased in it don’t have any living relatives.

The fox is related to the dog and the lion is related to the house cat. The platypus is not like any animal on Earth. It’s a monotreme, a mammal branch that split away from all of the other, live-birth, hair having about 165 million years ago. There are four examples of monotremes that are similar to our platypus, but they belong to a different family with our erstwhile Agent P being the sole member of Ornithorhynchidae family. Even in the animal kingdom, family isn’t easy.

The Purple Frog, a mysterious, large, blobby creature that’s all muscle and no head, looks like it could be a bouncer at that popular club down the street if it weren’t so shy. It lives underground in south India in its burrow 15 feet below the surface and only emerge before the pending rain season. They only come out from their dwelling to reproduce, fertilizing the eggs that the female has released into a pool of water. The tadpoles then go on to live in fast moving streams until their metamorphosis into adulthood, when they burrow 15 feet underground to start the process all over again.

To my fifth-grade students in search of a freaky, unique animal tale that will engage your teachers and make your friends jealous they didn’t discover that critter first, read this book. It’s the resource guide for 12 animals that they don’t know about, with enough scientific facts, but not gross-out science facts; to make creating the book report fun to learn about and present.

But I don’t like to read. You can hear some ten-year-old students whining like a California grape can’t you? Those kids have bought into the faux cool factor that reading isn’t what the cool kids do. Whenever I encounter kids like that I ask them if they like money. They always say yes. I ask them if they want to have a good job when they get older. They always say yes and thankfully less of them are saying that they want to be an ‘influencer’.

The illustrations in Like No Other are painted, big, and do a great job of personalizing and abstractly showing these animals. The animals are realistic, but presented with just enough detail to make them ‘big kid’, but with enough rounded edges to where they’re approachable for young ages. They’re shown in corner-to-corner full-color glossy pages. The text is the blurb of two-to-three sentences that upper-elementary students are accustomed to. It’s informative enough to shed new light on things that they didn’t know and has vocabulary that most upper elementary ages will be able to swim through easily.

Like No Other: Earth’s Coolest One-Of-A-Kind Creatures is a soft-education book. The information in it is STEM, non-fiction and educational; usually the sort of things that young students only engage in under duress. However, the book’s presentation is fun, by the fact that their peers say they shouldn’t read it, but they’ll want to read it. Take the road less traveled, which in this case is ironically the easier road, and let the lemmings who mock reading or embrace boring books stay where they are and produce sub-par book reports that teachers have seen easy to look at and has imaginative illustrations that please their senses. They’ll be momentarily flummoxed hundreds of times.

Like No Other: Earth’s Coolest One-Of-A-Kind Creatures is by Sneed B. Collard III with illustrations by Christopher Silas Neal and is available on Kane Press, an imprint of Astra Books for Young Readers.

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