TOS Review: Amazing Animals by Design

Amazing Animals By Design, written by Debra Haagen, is a very well illustrated and enjoyable children's book that we got to review for the TOS Crew this month. While we teach our children that God "created" the world and everything in it, it's not often that we explain to them how intelligent and intricate God's design is. The book Amazing Animals By Design is a great way to introduce that concept to children because in the story they learn that God not only created the animals but He "designed" each one of them in a very specific and unique way.

This book starts off by introducing you to two young children, Sarah and John who are on their way to visit the zoo.



During their tour the kids find out some amazing things about how animals were designed. For instance they saw a cat with strange tufts on it's ears and discovered that this cat is called a caracal.



Gess was apparently fascinated with it's tufts too, here she is making some of her own!


But the tufts weren't the most amazing thing about this cat. The caracal actually can't balance as well as other cats so it can't climb trees, but God designed the caracal with a special talent that enabled it to catch it's prey anyway. The caracal can actually jump 12 feet in the air! This enables him to knock about 12 birds out of the air in one jump, so who needs to climb trees, right?

At each exhibit the children learn an interesting and unique way in which each animal was designed. At the end of the book the children note that they heard the word design often during the tour and so the parents explain that God has designed all of his creation in a special way.

Gess really enjoyed the book. She loves zoos and learning about animals and as you can see from the picture above she certainly paid attention and even interacted with the book. She's read it more than once and would probably read it more often if I had the hard copy rather than the digital format, although I do hope to get her an e-reader or tablet someday soon.


I also enjoyed the book and as a Christian think it is a great tool to help children learn about God's amazing creation and design.

Amazing Animals By Design, by Debra Haagen can be purchased online at Tate Publishing. You can get it in paperback for $8.99 or as an ebook digital download for $7.99. To learn more about the book you can visit the author's book site or blog or see what other members of the TOS Crew thought about it.

Disclaimer: As a member of the TOS Homeschool Crew I received a digital copy of Amazing Animals by Design for giving my honest opinion and assessment of this product in my review.