Eco Child’s Play

It’s a great time of year for trees and kids–all of a sudden, these big, stable background pieces of summer are starting to CHANGE! They’re turning colors, and delicious things are ready to be picked from them, and leaves are falling off of them–awesome! It’s a great time not only to make some autumn crafts with kids but also to read with them about trees and leaves, reinforcing the concept of seasonality, educating them about botany and agriculture, and celebrating and honoring the natural wonders in their own backyards.

Here’s what we’re reading this month:

• » See also: Grow Your Own Tree Hugger: 101 Activities to Teach Your Child How to Live Green
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• ABCedar by George Ella Lyon : Illustrations of leaves, berries, and branches held by a diverse spectrum of hands are the centerpiece of each page of this alphabet book of trees. It’s a nice choice to read to a couple of kids of very different ages–littles like the alphabet, and bigs can talk about the distinguishing characteristics of each tree.
• The Apple Pie Tree: by Zoe Hall: Reinforcing not only the concept that living things grow and change, but also that living things all rely on each other in this world, two children watch their apple tree blossom and become a safe place for a nest of birds, they worry about it in storms, they enjoy its cool shade, and they harvest and bake apple pie from its apples.
• Winter Trees by Carole Gerber: Although the snow is on the ground in this book, the focus is on tree identification after the leaves have fallen, something that we can already see in many parts of the autumn world. This is a useful distinction, because most tree identification books focus on leaves, frustrating kiddos who commonly develop an interest in trees in late autumn.
• Up, Up, Up! It’s Apple-Picking Time by Jody Fickes Shapiro : Two small children are useful helpers at an apple orchard, both picking and selling apples at their grandparents’ little farm, but the best part of the book, in my opinion, is the full-color labeled illustration of about 20 different kinds of apples on the free- and paste-down endpapers. How many have you tasted?
• Tell Me, Tree: All About Trees for Kids by Gail Gibbons: A well-illustrated children’s educational book with a lot of facts about a lot of topics, this is where you turn when your kiddo asks, “Why does the silver maple have leaves that are different from the sugar maple?” The book also encourages some creative independent learning strategies by demonstrating leaf pressing, bark rubbings, and ideas for a basic sketchbook.
• Trees by Allen J. Coombes: The Smithsonian Handbooks series looks rather sophisticated at first glance, but my kiddos have been in love with these books, written about everything from dinosaurs to flowers, since they were toddlers. At its heart, the book basically consists of photographs and labels, showing each tree and its leaf, flower, and fruit. Older kids can use the same text for tree identification around the neighborhood, or to learn facts ranging from Latin names to native regions.

Here are some other suggestions for environmental children’s literature. What are your favorite tree hugger books?

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