On a gold-blooming, bee-zooming, sun-dazzling day . . . / Snakes glide. / Spiders hide. / Crickets chirp. / Butterflies slurp. From Buffy Silverman, author of On a Snow-Melting Day, comes an exciting companion book. As autumn begins, plants and animals in nature begin to change in all kinds of ways to prepare for winter. Brilliant photos and rhyming text work together in this engaging read-aloud to highlight these changes, and back matter offers more information about each creature and change featured. "Colorful photographs and short, rhyming phrases extol the glories of autumn in the Northeastern and Midwestern sections of the United States. 'On a gold-blooming, / bee-zooming, / sun-dazzling day . . .' Each of those phrases is in a bold white font against a different vibrant photograph of, for instance, goldenrod, a bee on a purple coneflower, and an autumn landscape bright with red and orange maple leaves. These are followed by more eye-catching photographs accompanied by pairs of rhyming, two-word, noun-verb combinations ('Crickets chirp. / Butterflies slurp'). The clever poetry pattern repeats several times, with the final page-still in two words-summing up the many parts. Excellent backmatter elaborates-in sequential order-on the various phrases, adding rudimentary scientific explanations of, for example, fall animal behaviors, photosynthesis, thunderstorms, and why breezes chill a human being's skin. The book offers older students the opportunity to learn about word usage and try their hand at writing poetry that uses the text's format. People appear in two photographs-in the first, a dark-haired, light-skinned family of four revels in apple-picking; in the second, which includes the poem's penultimate line, a brown-skinned child hugs a dog in the midst of a pile of fallen leaves. (This book was reviewed digitally.) Sun-dazzling!"-Kirkus Reviews

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