Gone Wild: An Endangered Animal Alphabet

Gone Wild: An Endangered Animal Alphabet, written by David McLimas, is a picture book that won the Caldecott Honor Award in 2007. Gone Wild takes you on an awesome alphabet safari to showcase some of the world's endangered species, like the Swan Goose and the Andean Flamingo, as letters of the alphabet. McLimas highlights the differences between critically endangered, endangered and vulnerable species before starting the alphabet, and uses bold illustrations to create animals out of letters. McLimas not only provides an endangered animal per letter, but also includes statistics and facts about each animal to create an enriching and exciting lesson. This book could be used as an introduction to learning about endangered animals and species of the world, as a component of a geography lesson that involves learning about which animals live on different continents, or as a resource for students looking to research an endangered animal. This picture book is very informative and I personally learned a lot that I didn't know before, and McLimas does a great job including animals from many unique parts of the world. My personal reaction to this book was that it made me immediately want to look up pictures and more facts about these rare and beautiful animals.

McLimas, D. (2006). Gone wild: An endangered animal alphabet. New York: Walker Publishing Company.