Educational and entertaining illustrated books have a sweet spot in our hearts. Elementary school children want to be entertained, and they don’t mind learning. While parents or educators would prefer that the verbs in that previous sentence were flipped and that learning came first in the equation, it’s not. Busy Spring, Nature Wakes Up by Sean Taylor, Alex Morss with illustrations by Cinyee Chiu is an illustrated book that softly tells a story about a dad and his two daughters on an early spring day.
It softly tells and softly teaches, the latter part being the aspect that those education-minded adults are keen on. Dad is taking his two girls to the garden so that they can dig some holes. The older daughter is helping by carrying some of the tools they’ll be using while the younger one is happy splashing in the puddles with her boots.
Everything in the garden is popping, blooming, or otherwise growing. The flowers are as tall as Jasmine, the younger girl. The three walk down to the pond and see tadpoles and a couple of frogs. They also see a compost heap and are delighted when dad takes a tool and peels up the first layer. The girls see the massive amounts of ants, worms, and other insects that make up nature’s recyclers that produce the black gold that gardeners crave.
We also see caterpillars, butterflies, birds building nests, and other spring-like signs that children see, but might not question, especially at those early elementary ages. Busy Spring is written in lots of simple sentences and some compound sentences. It’s a calming book whose pace is as chilled out as the spring day that the young family is experiencing. The text does not rhyme. Those students in second through third grade will appreciate that fact. By that age, some students will want a book that doesn’t talk down to them, while at the same time, offering them aspects of literary things they’ve enjoyed.
The educational and entertaining illustrated book is a rare duck. Busy Spring, Nature Wakes Up ends with a more in-depth look at some of the things that readers discovered. It specifically names the flowers and trees, like animals, habitats, and ecosystems. These pages are written in a more mature way like they’re reading a nature book. There’s also a page on more ways to help and a list of websites for those older readers to learn more about nature in kid-friendly environments.
For a period in your house library, Busy Spring will have a go-to place as your five to seven-year-old is learning about the environment. The art is precise and draws the animals and landscape from a variety of vantage points. This underlies the soft, story form education that will allow those non-nature kids to embrace the book in a disarming way. Stealth education is the best kind of learning for some kids when it comes to a nature book.
Busy Spring, Nature Wakes Up is by Sean Taylor and Alex Morss with illustrations by Cinyee Chiu and available on words & pictures, an imprint of Quarto Knows.
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