Slowing Down for Learning

  
              Thanks to Alyson Beecher's Non-Fiction Picture Book Challenge at Kidlit Frenzy, everyone shares wonderful non-fiction picture books.

             Be sure to go here to Mary Lee's post at The Poetrepository for line number twenty-seven of the April Progressive Poem created by Irene Latham.

        I was reminded of the final line from a poem by Eve Merriam when I read this book:

A Lazy Thought
 

There go the grownups
To the office,
To the store.
Subway rush,
Traffic crush;
Hurry, scurry,
Worry, flurry.

No wonder
Grown ups
Don’t grow up
Any more.
It takes a lot
Of slow
To grow.

           April Pulley Sayre has included such a myriad of topics in this new book that I had to take it slow in order to absorb the information. (Perhaps it was her goal?) She writes of Mayflies living only a day, and wonders how time feels to them. Then there are the sequoias, growing slowly, but lasting long, so long that a timeline showing some "time" highlights of a tree ring go all the way back to 574BCE, before Athens became a city! There are pages about "slow stomachs" (digestion) and the speed of snails. I was mesmerized by the facts, and also by the way the information is presented with extraordinary creativity by Kelly Murphy. 


         In Murphy's art, she includes speech bubbles, cartoon drawings, regular text, page-filled graphics, and hand-written facts. I imagine children using the index in the back just as they might use an encyclopedia, to research one particular thing, or to look for a special research topic. April has added extra topics at the back, a double-page on which to rest one's head and ponder things like sloth fur or periwinkles and dark matter. In other words, take it slow! And there is also a helpful glossary. 

         And I imagine building an entire year around the topics in this book, learning, researching, taking SLOW time to learn and grow. Great innovative book! Here are a few page examples