Welcome to the Children’s Garden--a beautiful place to connect with nature and the food cycle! Illustrated with colorful paintings, this charming picture book features a diverse group of children connecting to food through hands-on outdoor activity. Down the road from Woodlawn Avenue, on a street called Sunnyside, there’s a garden patch grown by children who live in the neighborhood. A sign on the garden’s gate says: Children’s Garden, WELCOME! That means: Come in, please. Listen, see, smell, touch--even taste! In rich prose and lush illustrations, this charming picture book shows children as urban farmers, exploring the sights, smells, sensations, and tastes of growing their own food in a community garden. The story invites young readers to enjoy summer’s bounty and the hands-on experience of tending and harvesting it, while the colorful illustrations depict a multicultural community of children learning about and enjoying a sustainable, local food system.

Children’s gardens are magical places where kids can interact with plants, see where food and fibers grow, and experience the role of birds, butterflies, and bees in nature. These gardens do more than just expose youngsters to outdoor environments, they also provide marvelous teaching opportunities for them to visit a small plot, care for vegetables and flowers, and interact in creative spaces designed to stimulate all five senses. In The Magic of Children’s Gardens, landscape architect Lolly Tai provides the primary goals, concepts and key considerations for designing outdoor spaces that are attractive to and suitable for children especially in urban environments. Tai presents inspiring ideas for creating children’s green spaces by examining nearly twentycase studies, including the Chicago Botanic Gardens and Longwood Gardens in Kennett Square, PA. The Magic of Children’s Gardens features hundreds of comprehensive drawings and gorgeous photographs of successful children’s outdoor environments, detailed explanations of the design process, and the criteria needed to create attractive and pleasing gardens for children to augment their physical, mental, and emotional development. Exposing youth to well-planned outdoor environments promotes our next generation of environmental stewards. The Magic of Children's Gardens offers practitioners a guide to designing these valued spaces.

Living in ruin and rubble with a wire fence and soldiers separating him from the cool hills where his father used to take him as a small child, a boy's tiny, green plant shoot gives him hope in a bleak landscape.

A girl and her neighbor grow a community from their garden. Grace thinks Larry’s garden is one of the wonders of the world. In his tiny backyard, Larry grows extraordinary vegetables, with Grace as his helper. They water and weed, plant and prune, hoe and harvest. And whenever there’s a problem, Grace and Larry solve it together. Grace soon learns that Larry has big plans for the vegetables in his garden. And when the garden faces its biggest problem yet, Grace follows Larry’s example to find the perfect solution. Amazing things can grow when you tend your garden with kindness.

So begins this lyrical tribute to the bugs, bees, and birds that make the garden such a busy place. With each turned page, more visitors appear, and all the while the “surprise”—a chrysalis—changes unnoticed until, on the last page, a butterfly emerges and flies away across the garden’s well-tended borders. Back-of-book notes about the natural histories of the garden’s denizens complete this lovely and lively portrait of backyard nature, which is also a gentle meditation on the rewards of paying attention. A chipmunk hides on every page to divert and engage young readers.Fountas & Pinnell Level O This is my busy green garden. There’s a surprise In clever disguise, That hangs in my busy green garden. This is a ladybug dawdling so, Near the surprise, in clever disguise, That hangs in my busy green garden. This is a honeybee buzzing below The red spotted ladybug dawdling so, Near the surprise, in clever disguise, That hangs in my busy green garden.

'A Child's Garden' offers a wide range of innovative examples showing how to create special places in which children can experience nature on their own home turf.

Parents and teachers, turn nagging about nose-picking and other gross habits into STEM learning moments with Pick, Spit & Scratch! Each spread presents a specific bad habit along with weird, disgusting facts. As any parent or teacher will attest, all kids have bad habits from, er, time to time. They pick their nose. They hold their pee. Or pee in pools. They pick their nose. They don’t brush their teeth. They pick their nose. But we seldom stop to think that there are science lessons in these habits. Each spread in Pick, Spit & Scratch! describes a specific bad habit, and provides multilayered reading opportunities in the form of weird, disgusting facts that ratchet up the gross factor. Bad habits are transformed into relatable concepts for kids; for example, we swallow up to a quart of snot a day—enough to fill a small milk carton. In some cases, the author even debunks myths about bad habits by introducing counter-intuitive scientific research (boogers may actually have health benefits) or humorously turning the tables on adults (one study showed that most adults pick their noses, too). Kids will love Pick, Spit & Scratch! because it's gross. Parents will love it because it says, “I told you so.” The book may not break habits, but it might just make us think before we engage in them!