In honor of his ninetieth birthday, Eric Carle's four best stories about small critters have been collected in a beautiful, sturdy reading volume. Each story is accompanied by a recipe and activities for the whole family: make a spider web of salt sticks together, craft your own cricket instrument, make click beetle banana suns and find the firefly together on the search page.

For fifty years, children's book author and illustrator Eric Carle has been creating the most beautiful books for children of all ages. 'The big book of small animals' is a collection of the loosely published stories 'The spider that was too busy', 'The cricket that couldn't chirp', 'The handsome click beetle' and 'The lonely firefly'. For all existing and new fans of the world famous maker of 'Caterpillar Never Enough'.