Books About Underground Animals

There were a few books we enjoyed reading to go along with our U is for Underground animals theme. Some of the the books I’m sharing today are related to underground animals in general as this was the focus of our activities. I’m also including a few books that we read about specific animals. For each individual animal that lives underground there are also many other books that could support your underground animal theme.

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{Note: As always, this book list is based on my personal preference, and I’ve included Amazon affiliate links for your convenience.}

More Resources for Little Book Lovers

The best way to encourage a love of reading is to provide kids with many opportunities to engage with a wide variety of books that are of interest to them. That’s why we share so many books lists on Fantastic Fun and Learning. We want to make it easy for you to find great books your kids will love. Over the years we’ve also discovered some helpful tools for connecting kids and books.

Digital libraries are one very handy way to do this. Epic! is one of our favorite online libraries. It’s full of over 25,000 books, learning videos, quizzes and more for kids 12 and under…and it’s free for educators. Click here to learn more and sign up.

Book Boxes are another fun way to get kids excited about reading. What kid doesn’t love to get a special delivery in the mail?! The crew over at Bookroo finds the best little known books that you won’t already have in your library, and they send them to you each month. Take a peak inside a Bookroo Box here.

Book-Based Activities are also a lot of fun for kids. Jodie over at Growing Book by Book has saved us all a ton of time and created a full year of Book-Based Activity Calendars so that you can extend the fun with a special book each week.

Books about Spring

And Then It’s Spring is more about the arrival of spring than underground animals, but there is a wonderful illustration of different underground animals in their tunnels and burrows. This is the book that initially sparked the kids’ interest in learning about things that live underground.

Denise Fleming’s underGROUND is perfect for preschoolers. The text is very simple, and there are few words per page.  This allowed us to focus on the meaning of the words and the detailed illustrations. The kids enjoyed spotting each of the various underground creatures on each page. We revisited this book many times throughout our theme and enjoyed reading the brief descriptions of the animals at the back of the book.

Animals Under Our Feet (We Both Read) is designed for beginning readers to read along with a proficient reader.  The left page includes simple text while the right page includes more detailed explanations and more challenging text. We read some of the facts that the kids were most interested in, and we will revisit this book again as the kids begin to bcome readers themselves. At the preschool level, the kids liked some of the basic facts and loved the photographs throughout the book.

Deep Down Underground is not currently in print, but if you are doing an underground theme it is definitely worth finding at a local library if you can. Kids enjoy chanting along and joining in the actions as they count underground creatures from 1 to 10 and back again. I also loved the rich vocabulary words used throughout the book. The use of words like scamper, prance, and glide, give the opportunity for great discussions and are excellent for early exposure.

We also discovered The Hole Truth series as we explored this theme. The current books in this series include:

Groundhog’s Burrow

Chipmunk’s Hole

Fox’s Den

Prairie Dog’s Hideaway

The preschoolers enjoyed learning about each of the individual animals through these books, and there is a lot of useful information that also makes this series perfect for us to revisit in future years. All of the books used many nonfiction text features that are great for teaching kids. Some specific examples are maps, labels, diagrams, glossaries, and indexes.

My favorite part of the series is the inclusion of thought provoking questions throughout the books. Many of them started with, “Why do you think…?” Even at the preschool level these questions can be helpful in getting kids to think about what they are learning and come up with reasons that support their ideas. I LOVED the kids’ answers to many of these questions!

What books would you add to this list? They can be about underground animals in general or your favorite books about specific animals that live underground. I’d love to hear your thoughts!

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