Category: Elementary school

Effective illustrated books have the potential for more purpose than telling simple stories. Granted, that is where most illustrated or picture books reside, but some of them live in a vein diagram world with more intersections. Wonders of the Night Sky is an illustrated book that has its fingers in the figurative pie of several circles and acts as a lushly illustrated reference book or a highly detailed illustrated book, just to mention two of them. One could also marvel at Wonders of the Night Sky just for its artwork as you appreciate the thousand shades of blue that are deftly mixed with the blackness of outer space. It also might make you gaze up at the night sky a bit more, especially if you’re in a more rural area, and are able to see more of the limitless palette of darkness that are interspersed with lights of a different color.

The story within The Girl Who Heard the Music is interesting. It’s about a piano prodigy who lived on a remote island. It’s also about a massive trash problem that the island is constantly dealing with from its tourists and the water surrounding it. It’s also about a school that was built from tens of thousands of bottles and cans. There’s a lot happening in The Girl Who Heard the Music and somewhere in the book is an inspiring story, if you manage to isolate that aspect of it.

While his name might not be on the tip of your tongue, you know the story of Jadav Payeng. He’s the Indian teenager who in 1979, started planting seeds on an abandoned, arid, desolate riverbank where nothing had ever grown before. Every day he returned to the area to plant new seeds and water the existing ones. Over time his trees turned into a thicket and then a forest, which eventually attracted insects, then the birds that consume (or live symbiotically with) them. The Forest Keeper is an illustrated book that tells this story in a manner that makes this stranger-than-fiction story grounded and very much in a matter-of-fact.

STEM and poetry are two things that early elementary illustrated readers don’t see too much of. They see lots of illustrated books on cute topics that softly teach morals or lessons. In those books, there might be rhyming words or stanzas, but it’s not what educators would cast as poetry. The same can be said for the infrequency of non-fiction illustrated books in that there aren’t many of them. Super Small, Miniature Marvels of the Natural World seeks to bridge that gap, by doing so in an improbable combination.