Quick Booktalk
A teacher and a group of diverse students narrate poems celebrating the garden they have created at their school.
About the Illustrations
The pictures are a mix of fanciful drawings of plants with faces and insects with human features, more naturalistic drawings of the plants and animals in the garden, and scenes featuring cartoonish kids tending to the garden. The illustrations set a very informal and fun tone for the book.
Story Time Possibilities
While this book is too long to read aloud in its entirety at most story times, the individual poems stand alone well enough that it would be possible to choose a handful of selections to add to a story time plan. The pictures are a bit detailed to be seen at a distance, but the poems can mostly be enjoyed audibly without losing any of the meaning. There is a poem called "Water Lines" that is written for two voices that would be fun to try with school-age kids.
Reader's Advisory
This is a book that is probably best suited to elementary school classrooms. It's set in a school and focuses not just on the school garden, but in the back matter, on poetry forms. It strikes me as the kind of thing would lend itself to poetry assignments and reports about plants. We happen to be studying plants in our homeschool right now, so my plan is to make it available for pleasure reading, especially to my six-year-old who loves to compose her own poetry.
Disclosure
I received a finished copy of Behold Our Magical Garden from Candlewick Press in exchange for an honest review.
