Books to help you spring into nature…

By Kathryn Will and River Lusky

As we emerge from a long winter with the lengthening of days to warm the earth, I am drawn to books that get us thinking about nature–the plant and animal life in the world. As the NCBLA committee will tell you, I love books about nature, and this year many of the books we reviewed for the 2022 Notable Children’s Books in the Language Arts award list were about the natural world. 
 
For this text set we chose three books that leverage nonfiction, poetry, and a picture book to develop content knowledge, build vocabulary, and encourage divergent thinking about the natural world. They invite readers to be curious about nature in both big and small ways. Teachers can easily deepen and extend the texts through a variety of activities, and we have created a few to get you started.

Wonder Walkers

In the book Wonder Walkers, written and illustrated by Micha Archer and published by Penguin House, readers are invited to notice and wonder in the everyday natural world around them through metaphorical thinking. The children in the story examine the world around them with varying perspectives, asking questions such as, “Are trees the sky’s legs? Is the wind the world breathing?” The text and beautiful collages synergistically invite the readers to imagine what they see with genuine curiosity, to observe and ask questions about the natural world around them.
 
After reading the book, take your classroom outside for a walk to provide students with the opportunity to notice nature. Invite them to sketch something they find before giving them time for quiet reflection while listening to the natural world around them as they make their own wonderings like the children in the book. The individual wonderings could even be combined for a class book. Our Wonder Walk Resource can be helpful in supporting students' note-taking. To access the document and create a copy for your use, click on the "Make a Copy" button.

If you are interested in learning more about how Micah Archer creates her collages check out the two videos below. The first provides a a brief glimpse of her printmaking, and the second offers a much more extensive look into how she creates the collage materials and assembles them for the book.

What's inside a flower and other questions about science and nature

What's inside a flower and other questions about science and nature, written and illustrated by Rachel Ignotofsky, published by Crown Books for Young Readers, invites the reader into the how and why of flowers. In this book the reader journeys through a flower with detailed and mature illustrations down to the roots, up the stem, and into the bud highlighting each intricate aspect of the parts of a flower. The exploratory journey through the biology of flowers as well as what other creatures assist and benefit from flowers, will have students on the edge of their seats asking questions. With rich backmatter, the book encourages further exploration of this topic.
 
After an initial read of What’s Inside a Flower the students may use it as a reference book, as students use cut flowers to sketch, dissect, and label the parts of the flower. To amplify this lesson, teachers could turn their classroom into a garden or use their school gardens if available. Having each student plant their own flower and record daily or weekly observations, perhaps adding variables like amount of sunlight, presence of earthworms, or watering rate to allow students to compare and contrast their plant growth rate. Rachel Ignostofsky has created multiple free resources for you to use for these activities.

Author Read Aloud. Brightly Storytime is is a co-production of Penguin Random House.

The dirt book: Poems about animals that live beneath our feet

The dirt book: Poems about animals that live beneath our feet, written by David L. Harrison, illustrated by Kate Cosgrove, published by Holiday House is a book of vertical panoramas with one poem per page. The 15 poems in this book might pique your interest in the world beneath your feet not often thought of. The reader journeys with creatures like a doodlebug and a chipmunk through a series of poems with beautifully detailed illustrations that depict their below ground habitats. An author’s notes and bibliography invite the reader to extend their learning. 
 
These poems are perfect for choral reading and micro episodes of reader’s theater.  Try a reader’s theater by having groups of students pick a favorite poem and after multiple reads, act it out for the class. Or as a class, you might consider choosing something like a creek or a tree in your school environment and using the structure of this text to consider purposeful research about the various creatures who live within the boundary of place to create a book of poems. 
 
An interview with the author on Deborah Calb's Blog provides interesting insights into the book.

Announcing the 2022 NCBLA list

These are just three of the 774 books the seven members of the Notable Children’s Books in Language Arts book award committee read and reviewed for consideration of selection for the 30-book list created annually. The careful analysis and rich discussions over monthly (and sometimes weekly) Zoom sessions allowed us to create a thoughtful list that meets the charge of the committee.
 
The charge of the seven-member national committee is to select 30 books that best exemplify the criteria established for the Notables Award. Books considered for this annual list are works of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry written for children, grades K-8. The books selected for the list must:

1. be published the year preceding the award year (i.e., books published in 2015 are considered for the 2016 list);
   
2. have an appealing format;
3. be of enduring quality;
4. meet generally accepted criteria of quality for the genre in which they are written; and
5. meet one or more of the following criteria:
   1. deal explicitly with language, such as plays on words, word origins, or the history of language;
   2. demonstrate uniqueness in the use of language or style; and/or
      
   3. invite child response or participation.

We are really excited about the final list for the 2022 (copyright 2021) Notable Children’s Books in the Language Arts list and hope you will be too! 

2022 NCBLA Committee members

Kathryn Will, Chair (University of Maine Farmington) @KWsLitCrew
Vera Ahihya (Brooklyn Arbor Elementary School) @thetututeacher
Patrick Andrus (Eden Prairie School District, Minnesota) @patrickontwit
Dorian Harrison (Ohio State University at Newark)
Laretta Henderson (Eastern Illinois University) @EIU_PKthru12GEd
Janine Schall (The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley)
Fran Wilson (Madeira Elementary School, Ohio) @mrswilsons2nd

 *All NCBLA Committee members are members of CLA

Kathryn Will is Assistant Professor Literacy at the University of Maine Farmington. She served as Chair of the 2022 Notable Children’s Books in Language Arts committee.
River Lusky is an undergraduate student at the University of Maine Farmington.