We stumbled upon an incredibly fun and memorable book and couldn’t wait to share it with you. It ties in beautifully with lessons on continents, biomes, and animal biodiversity. And, let me tell you, kids pick up on the refrain of this book and say it over and over. It sticks. So whether you’re doing an at-home or classroom read-aloud or are a librarian leading story time, this one is a winner! Plus, subscribers can access a continent printable freebie in both English and Spanish. Read more about the continent printable freebie, as well as other tie-in freebies around the web, below.

The Book

DISCLAIMER: This post covering books about the book Except Antarctica and a subscriber’s continents freebie contains affiliate links, which means we may earn a small commission if you purchase the linked books. We only include resources we have actually read, used, and valued. If you love legalese or need some bedtime reading, you can read our full disclosure here.

Except Antarctica

Target Ages / Group

This book is a super fun read-aloud for grades PK-3rd. Most 2nd and 3rd graders can probably read the book independently, and younger students will benefit from repetition within it. Most K-1st students can identify some of the words if the reader/librarian points them out the first two or so times they appear. I would also recommend this book for ESL/ESOL classes because it contains some light colloquial language, such as “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

Learning Standards

A few generic learning standards covered by this book are:

• Determine words’ meanings from context
• Describe what happens in a story
• Use repetition / patterns to memorize
• Use and/or identify in-text or printing features, such as italics, bold, punctuation, captions, etc.
• Use, identify objects on, and gain important exposure to continents and maps
• Identify land versus water on maps

Teacher’s Guide

The book’s author, Todd Sturgell, has a teacher’s guide on his website; however, please note you’ll need to join his free mailing list to access it.

If you already have a free Teachers Pay Teachers (TPT) account, you can download the same teacher’s guide from the book’s publisher here.

Read-Aloud

Sometimes a read-aloud is what you need, especially if you’re working on virtual or digital lessons or are trying to differentiate, create stations, or work with other students. There are several around the internet, including a cute one below.

Special Note

As of the date this blog was published, this book has not yet been translated to Spanish. Hopefully it will be soon because it would make an amazing addition to immersion and language classrooms and also to bilingual library collections.

Other Free Tie-In Resources

Check out some other freebie tie-in resources below. The continent printable freebie is exclusive to our subscribers, but you can join free anytime by signing up below. If you’re already a subscriber, you can also put your email address in the box to receive a Subscriber’s Library password reminder email. The other below freebies require a free account on Teachers Pay Teachers (TPT), which, in our opinion, is totally worth the sign-up.

Continents Freebie

How many continents are there? Depends on your perspective! We’ll hopefully post a long blog post about this soon, but the simplified version is that many countries teach that there are seven continents and many others teach six. (Some others say that there are only five.)

We’ve covered both the six and seven continent perspective in the free continents printable freebie. To access it, simply put your email address in the box below, and the password to the pictured freebie and many, many more freebies will be sent to you. No spam ever; subscribe and unsubscribe anytime.

Freebies on Teachers Pay Teachers (TPT)

PENGUINS AND TURTLES: For the K-3 crowd, here’s a high-quality turtle life-cycle add-on from the K-2 Guru. It includes some adorable manipulables. If you’re working with the PK crowd, try this Antarctica puzzle pack from That Geeky Teacher or this adorable Penguin Research Station Dramatic Play Pack from Pre-K Printable Fun.

MAPS AND PICTURES: If you’re looking for some beautiful visual aids to connect the book to real life, check out these two freebie pictures of Antarctica from The Harstad Collection. Looking for some free coloring pages or pages that can be integrated as worksheets or note-taking pages? Check out this freebie from Teach with Mackenzie. Or try this extremely high-quality beginning reader.

READING AND WRITING: For students in roughly grades 2nd through 4th, The Principal’s Wife has an excellent non-fiction reading and writing pack focused on Antarctica. Kids will love working through how a real kid might go about a day in Antarctica. Ben Lukis has a free Antarctica reasearch project here. And Carson Dellosa Education has a free, extremely high-quality beginning reader that is perfect for nearly any PK-elementary classroom. Or, try this tie-in K-2nd Passport to Antarctica activity from Olivia Meek.