Visit Alyson Beecher on Wednesdays for Non-Fiction Picture books at Kidlit Frenzy. From Alyson and others, you will discover wonderful non-fiction books!
“Time in nature is not leisure time; it's an essential investment in our children's health (and also, by the way, in our own).”
― Richard Louv, Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder
It's so important to me that we all learn to love our earth, and that we share that love with our children, those we raise and those we teach.
It’s an inspiring story by Jacqueline Briggs Martin (Snowflake Bentley, Farmer Will Allen and The Growing Table, among others) of a man named Mike who moves to some land and discovers that where he wanted to restore a corn field back to a prairie, he was told there had been a creek. Through years of work, he searched and found it, and Brook Creek is born again. Gorgeous scratchboard and painted illustrations by Claudia McGehee show the journey, the ripples and new life returning to the creek restored. First came the big machines that dug and dug until the trickle began to fill the stream bed. Grasses were planted and in a few years, more rocks were placed. Insects returned to leave their eggs, birds returned to nest, and finally, a few fish called ‘sculpin’ swam into the creek. The book explains that these fish indicate clean water, the same kind of water where brook trout survive. The journey continued when Mike and his friends added small “finger-sized” fish, trout! The language is poetic, like this: “Perhaps Brook Creek laughed, too--tickled by trout.”
Here are two books about two men who love the earth and show how wonderful it can be.
Along some pages lie small-print explanations of certain actions, like how the sculpin ended up in this new Brook Creek. They are helpful to the story and subtly placed within the illustrations. There is also author’s and illustrator’s notes and a small piece about the Mike in the story.