Age Range: 3 to 6
Tree is a beautifully illustrated, peek-through, rhyming story that shows the changes that take place to a tree 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.
Tree 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 stuck cotton wool and glitter on our winter tree, fingerprinted blossom onto our spring tree, stuck torn up tissue paper and made apples for our summer tree and cut out autumn coloured leaf shapes from magazines for our autumn tree.
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.
Author: Patricia Hegarty / Illustrator: Britta Teckentrup
by Patricia Hegarty [Little Tiger Kids]
£9.90
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EUR 12,69
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EUR 12,91
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$12.74
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
Hi, your activity is so beautiful and easy to do. Thanks for stopping by today and leaving a nice comment. I appreciate your support. I love this book too. I am starting to think about what to buy my grands for Christmas. They have lots of toys; so, I am going to buy books.
Thank you for visiting Story Snug too 🙂 I almost always give books to children as presents these days, there are so many great children’s books to choose from.
This does sound a beautiful book – I love the idea of the owl looking out throught the hole in the tree – and your artwork is splendid! Thank you for adding Tree to my book list at MWD.
My daughter loves the owl, he silently observes everything that goes on around him 🙂
I love your idea for a craft to accompany this sweet little book. My kids loved interactive books of any kind when they were little. We have some well-worn flaps in books we’ve read at home. Thanks for sharing in the Kid Lit Blog Hop.
We had a lot of fun using different craft mediums for each tree 🙂
What a lovely book and I it’s great when you can take the themes of a book and bring them to life via craft. Popping across from #TriedTested
xx
Our crafts are often inspired by picture books – this was a fun one to do 🙂
This sounds like such a lovely book….
Great ideas for some crafts to link with it x
It’s gorgeous, the kind of book where you just want to stroke the pages 🙂
What a brilliant activity to link with the book!
Thank you, we had a vague kind of idea about what we wanted to do but we also kind of made it up as we went along 🙂
This book is on my wishlist to buy after spotting it on the Little Tiger Press website. I love the craft you made too x
It’s a lovely book, a great coffee table book 🙂
This is truly beautiful, and would be perfect for season chats. Thanks for linking up with #TriedTested
It is a gorgeous book, I love Britta Teckentrup’s illustrations 🙂
Looks like a great book for early grades. Thanks for sharing on the Kid Lit Blog Hop.
Tree is a fantastic book for an early grade classroom.
I love the cover of Tree and your activity is simply wonderful! I am going to share it with my daughter. I think her boys will enjoy creating their own trees.
The tree activity was really fun and gave us lots to talk about 🙂