"There was a red milk snake
that spotted the mouse.
He slid from his house,
and he sprang at that mouse.
The snake slid and slithered
and swallowed the mouse.
The mouse from the thicket
gobbled the cricket."
In lively rhyming text, this cumulative tale shows young readers exactly how the food chain works in nature. It begins on a sunny morning, early in the day. With each turn of the page, the author adds bits and pieces of information concerning creatures and plants found in this natural forest setting.
The plants make their own food with help from the sun, and then provide food for forest creatures who nibble on grass and other goodies. One such creature is a hungry cricket that soon becomes a meal for a wee deer mouse, equally hungry for sustenance on the warm, sunny morning. The mouse is not safe from a red mill snake that slithers into the open with its eye clearly on a meal as well.
As each animal appears looking for its next meal, the ever-growing cumulative text makes its presence effective in the resulting search for food (as you can see from the quote at the start of this post). A red hawk is keen on the snake; a red fox takes a particular interest in the satiated hawk; and the fox becomes a meal for a large and hungry black bear.
The author then turns the table and allows readers to see what might happen if the cricket is too quick for the mouse, and the mouse eludes the snake, and so on. What a turn of events that is! When the bear misses the fox, she makes a meal of flowers and seeds - another satisfying part of a different food chain.
In final pages, a glossary is added to describe the food chain itself, a temperate deciduous forest, and a description of each of the forest inhabitants presented here.
Digital mixed-media illustrations add interest and understanding to this tale about the way one food chain works. Kids, who love the way cumulative text grows a story, will also find much to learn about the many wonders of the natural world.
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