Take a Plunge with Polar Bears!

Non-fiction gets a bad rap for being rather a dry, heavy and emotionless genre of book so for my non-fiction blog entries, I wanted to find books that kids would actually find interesting. While non-fiction has never been my personal favorite, I think I've found a few selections that defy the stereotype. The first one  is Polar Bears by Gail Gibbons. I selected this book because Gibbons is a prolific children's book author, whose many books I have fond memories of reading as a child. Gibbons writes on all subjects but pays particular attention to holidays and scientific topics, so Polar Bears is a great example of her work.

Polar Bears is filled with tons of useful and interesting facts about the majestic creatures, all highlighted by Gibbons' beautiful drawings. Polar bears can be found in the Arctic tundra and they are most powerful and biggest of all Arctic animals. These bears belong to the scientific family Ursidae and have been living on earth for about 100,000 years. Polar bears can grow to be up to 10 feet tall and weigh up to 1100 pounds! Females are about 2/3 of the size of males. They can run 30 miles an hour (short distances though) and swim for at least 40 miles. They have special adaptations like warm fur, thick pads on their paws, webbed paws and even an extra eyelid to help them survive in the Arctic's freezing climates! Polar bears eat seals and have a very keen sense of smell enabling to smell their prey from up to 3 miles away! They hunt by waiting by breathing holes for seals to come up for air, swatting the seal with its paws and pulling it from the water with its teeth.

Besides the basic facts, Polar Bears also taught me two very important things about the bears that I never knew before. The first is that in the spring, when all the ice melts, polar bears eat musk oxen and carribous and scavenge for berries, mushrooms and seaweed. I had never thought about what polar bears do when it isn't the dead of winter before! Secondly, did you know that in 1970, there was great concern for the existence of the polar bear? Hunting had reduced the bear population to just 5,000. After a ban was placed on hunting, the species repopulated to a population of about 20,000 to 40,000. But the bears are still threatened by drilling for oil and natural gas in the Arctic and global warming.

I found Polar Bears to be an informative and interesting read. The book gave a lot of detailed information while the accompanying pictures held my attention the entire time. I could definitely see using this in a science lesson on either habitats, adaptations or bear species.Students could use this book as a resource for  a research project or teachers could use it as an informative read-aloud, maybe even as a teaching point for non-fiction literature. Further, teachers seeking to integrate science and language arts hould check out all of Gail Gibbons' books to see if she has written one on their particular subject (I'll bet she has!). As a precaution, I would use this text in an upper elementary classroom since it is so detailed. Many younger students will have a hard time processing the information presented. However, older elementary students will be captivated by this frosty read!