Common Critters celebrates neighborhood wildlife in verse. A familiar cast of characters-worms, slugs, caterpillars, ladybugs, robins, mourning doves, houseflies, spiders, squirrels, skunks, and others-crawls, runs, buzzes, and flits through these lively poems, which show how exotic these seemingly ordinary creatures really are.

Dan Tavis's humorous illustrations crank up the delight, and a child wanting to learn more will find it in the natural-history backmatter. Pat Brisson employs a variety of verse forms in the book, and she shows how it's done in a back-of-book feature called "A Peek into the Poet's Toolkit."  

Common Critters is a three-tool STEAM book with delightful reading, natural history, and language skills rolled into one.