Tree is a beautifully illustrated, peek-through, rhyming story that shows the changes that take place during each different season. It’s a great book to read throughout the year but particularly good for autumn when children are often more aware of leaves changing colour and falling off the trees.
The Story: An owl sits in the trunk of a bare tree covered with snow. He observes the changes throughout the seasons and the reader is introduced to a variety of animals. The book goes full circle, even the owl disappears before spring comes again and all the animals come out to play.
Britta Teckentrup’s stunning illustrations complement Patricia Hegarty’s easy to read rhyming text. You can peek through the hole in the sturdy cover to see the owl sitting in the tree, the owl can be seen through a hole in the trunk throughout most of the story. More holes show animals, insects and birds playing in or sitting in the tree. The changing tree is the focus of every page, there are two lines of text underneath and animals, including foxes, squirrels and bears, appear according to the season. The illustrations are awesome and full of detail, my favourite spread shows the tree against a midsummer night’s sky and my daughter loves watching the little spider build his web on the trunk, it gets bigger throughout the book.
The book inspired us to talk about how trees look different during the different seasons and we created our own four seasons tree. We traced the tree in the book and cut four templates out of thick brown cardboard. Then we scored them down the middle so that we could fold them. We used cotton wool and glitter for winter, fingerprinted blossom for spring, stuck torn up tissue paper and made apples for summer and cut out autumn coloured leaf shapes from magazines for autumn.
Then we folded the four trees and stuck them together.
Tree would be a lovely book to include in a classroom topic on Time and The Seasons, a general topic about Nature or a more specific topic on Trees. Children could have fun trying to recreate the pictures and design their own four seasons trees.
Age Range: 3 to 6
Author: Patricia Hegarty / Illustrator: Britta Teckentrup
Thank you to Little Tiger Press for sending us a review copy of this beautiful, beautiful book which would make a great addition to a Key Stage One classroom or a home bookshelf.
More Autumn / Fall / Tree books and learning activities on Pinterest
Leave a Reply