Information you should know:

The DIRT Book is an informational book about things that live under the earth primarily for young readers in Elementary School.

The DIRT Book is also presented as a series of poems about the animals that live under the dirt. However I will be using it as an informational book.

Why Did I read this?

When I saw this book in the library I selected it because I wanted to use it for poetry. Typically I don’t like poetry but the informational aspect of the book made me curious. Additionally the book the cover is turned sideways, so to read the book you should turn the page up! This aspect made me want to experience a book like that.

Review:

Piggybacking off the interesting design choices I will be reviewing the illustrations, the effectiveness of the poetry in making the learning fun, and the informative value of the book.

Turn 90 Degrees

The first thing you see when you see the DIRT Book is that the cover isn’t right. To read the book you have to turn it 90 degrees to flip pages up like a notepad. This is a genius decision for the illustrations in the book. Each spread becomes extra long giving the book plenty of space to show what is happening above the Earth and to go down and look into what lies underneath. It also creates room for the poetry to sit in the right place on these beautifully colored pages.

Gone are the typical white pages of many picture books and replaced with lavishly colored full spreads of a cross section of animals living in their natural homes. Each animal is drawn with love and made to present as cute, even the spiders and creepy crawlies. Of course the book is colored in deep earth tones and dark colors featuring blues, browns, and yellows.

I love that the book is sideways, this gives the reader the experience of digging into the earth themselves every time they turn the page. It is also reminiscent of the cross sections of Earth you’ll often see in museums to determine the changes of the world around us over time.

Verse

I don’t like poetry. But this, this is fantastic. Each poem presents information about an animal that lives in the dirt and what it does. Each poem rhymes in simple limericks. Reading the book out loud really delivers the musical quality of the collection of poetry.

Additionally the poetry is chock full of facts. I particularly enjoyed the description of a Gopher Turtle who digs large burrows that many other animals use as their homes. The repeated, “The Gopher turtle has many guests // He never shows them if he thinks they’re pests” is particularly catchy (Harrison). The poetry does a great job at communicating information and has the additional benefit of serving as a small mnemonic device to make sure the already fun information sticks even better. I can 100% picture reading this to a child and having them repeat lines ad nauseum for the next few days.

The Fun Facts

This books serves well as a short information book. The books starts with a question and a hypothesis about what lives under the dirt, then explores how dirt is made. The bulk of the book has each page dedicated to a different animal that lives in or uses dirt in their everyday lives. Each poem contains a good amount of information about the animal and what is interesting about them. I think this serves as a fantastic way to introduce animals to young children that are curious about the world.

I don’t think it’s the be all end all of information. The communication through poetry makes it very fun and engaging as an introduction. The book however does not include a large amount of information and I would love to know more about trapdoor spiders and the gopher turtle. Therefore the book accomplishes it’s goal of making us curious and wanting to seek out additional information.

Final Review:

I would recommend this book to just about any child or parent. It was fantastic a solid 10/10 and I plan to use it in future book readings centered around animals.

Reference: Harrison, D. L. (2021). The dirt book: Poems about animals that live beneath our feet (K. Cosgrove, Illus.). Holiday House.