Hello! Welcome to the inaugural Touring Picture Book post! I have teamed up with three fellow book blogging mummies, Acorn Books, Along C...

Touring Picture Book: Up in the Leaves

Monday, May 14, 2018 BookBairn 16 Comments


Hello! Welcome to the inaugural Touring Picture Book post! I have teamed up with three fellow book blogging mummies, Acorn Books, Along Came Poppy and Mamma Filz, to share some of the very best and very newest picture book releases. Each of us absolutely love picture books and love doing activities based on them to get our kids excited about learning and books. So we have chosen a very special picture book and each of us will be sharing a great activity, craft, idea or way of using that book to enhance our children's reading and learning and you can find the links to the other three posts at the bottom of this blog post. So the first book is...

Up in the Leaves by Shira Boss and illustrated by Jamey Christoph


This a wonderful true story about the author's husband who between the ages of thirteen and twenty-on built twelve treehouses in New York City's Central Park. As a shy boy growing up in a busy city, Bob found solace in climbing the trees where he could escape the people and the noise of New York City. The first treehouse started as a simple platform from scavenged materials but as the leaves dropped from the trees in the autumn his treehouse was removed and so he determined to build something more elaborate with each redesign. With his final treehouse it had five different levels and even a bridge! But on his final day in the treehouse, the park staff called him down and offered him a job looking after the trees so that although he now sleeps in a bed in an apartment building near the park, he still made his home in the trees as he worked to keep them healthy. Isn't that a wonderful story of a true life free spirit and conservationist?

The illustrations in the book are a delight to behold as they capture the contrast of the city and the park showing the changes through the seasons and making the world amongst the treetops seem magical and blissful.




As much as I am a linguist at heart and I enjoy a good arts and craft activity,  I really enjoy trying to incorporate science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) into our book based play. BookBairn is only three so I wanted to create a simple maths activity for her to do that would use images from the story and introduce some simple sorting. She is good at sorting things by colour and big size and I thought I would introduce her to a very simple classification diagram with two categories: park and city. And I printed off a whole selection of different images of objects, animals and scenes from the streets of New York and from Central Park. I tried to find photographs that matched images from the book such as the lampposts, trains, bridges (which she later tried to find and match to images in the book too), and using a big sheet of brown parcel paper I wrote the two headings and let her sort! A quick and simple set up!


It was great fun and required lots of problem solving skills and as we sat to do it together I could hear all the wonderful language that she used to work her way through the images. I had made things a little trickier by including some things that could be found in both places like pigeons and lampposts but she quickly took in the background of the images and declared one a city pigeon and one a park pigeon based on them sitting on grass or on a sidewalk! She was also fascinated by the images that featured the trees in the foreground and the city buildings in the background deciding that these should go in the middle because "it's got park and city, mummy" (clearly we should have done a Venn diagram instead!). BookBairn enjoyed this challenge so much that she wants to do it over and over again, even explaining to her Daddy how to do it using lots of great language in doing so.


I hope you feel inspired to try some sorting with your little ones but if a maths activity isn't for you check out the other blog stops for the 'Touring Picture Book'.

Along Came Poppy - Mini Treehouse Craft
Mamma Filz - Changing Seasons Tree Craft

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*GIVEAWAY* Pop over to our Twitter to enter a giveaway to win one of three copies of this beautiful book!

And look out for our next touring picture book - "Dinosaurs Don't Draw" by Elli Woodward and illustrated by Steven Lenton.

And if you've popped over from one of the other fabulous blogs - hello! And our regular readers - hello to you too!

Happy Reading and Sorting,
Mummy, BookBairn and the Touring Picture Book Team!

Disclaimer: all four bloggers were sent copies of the book, and we were provided with giveaway copies, after we reached out to the publisher and requested them. Words and opinions are each of our own. 




Laura's Lovely Blog

16 comments:

  1. I love seeing the activities you pair with books, they're so original and inventive! This book sounds great and I love the story behind it. I think my 6 year old would really enjoy it - although I'd have to pretend it's for her little brother, she's far too old for picture books, of course ... ;) #ReadWithMe

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    1. Of course! This is certainly a great picture book for older readers!

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  2. What a great way to integrate some fascinating subjects in with a just as equally fascinating book #readwithme

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    1. Thanks Chantelle! I loved your blog post on this book too!

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  3. Never mind Venn diagrams it will be Boolean algebra next!

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    1. What's that?! Can you give me a lesson first!?

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  4. Love people who encourage learning and got very distracted by those utterly beautiful illustrations too #ReadWithMe

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  5. This sounds like such an inspiring book and a little bit different from the usual children's picture books. It looks like BookBairn had the best time with her sorting activity.

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    1. She really enjoyed it! I think we might need to do more things like this in future. I might need to get her to choose some categories!

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  6. It's amazing how much you realise they understand when you do activities like this, you definitely needed a Venn diagram! #Readwithme

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  7. We have this book, it really is wonderful. I love what you did with your daughter, I always approve of adding further activities to book reading.
    #KLTR

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    1. I think when you can connect it with books it makes them way more fun!

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  8. The illustrations looks absolutely stunning and I really like the premise of the story so different from what I've come across before. What a gorgeous book. #KLTR

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  9. What an inspiring story - more so that it's a true story - and the book looks wonderful. I love your classification activity, it sounds like it was very successful! #kltr

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