Tag Archives: Kids: books

If You Go Down to the Woods Today book

For kids
If You Go Down to the Woods Today (Brown Bear Wood)

Hello! Time flies too fast — it is January of 2022 while I am still contemplating a post with our garden update for 2021 !

Today we are having a beautiful winter day full of snow and really crisp temperatures, which is a real treat as so far this winter has been extremely dry and warm. And so while the boys are wrestling with their 74 year old grandma (my mom is truly epic) I got a little time to spend on my blog. So here is a little post about one of our most loved recent additions to kids library — “If You Go Down to the Woods Today (Brown Bear Wood)” book by Rachel Piercey, illustrated by Freya Hartas. This most beautiful book is done by Magic Cat publishing in UK, and is indeed magical!

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“How does my fruit grow?” by Gerda Muller

For kids, , ,
How Does My Fruit Grow? book by Gerda Muller

I’m excited to finally get a chance to post about “How Does My Fruit Grow?” by a wonderful children’s author and illustrator Gerda Muller. I actually started this post a year ago. So finally I’m getting to finish it up. 🙂

Gerda Muller is one of our most loved children’s author. Every single book by this author is so beautifully illustrated. But what I also really love about her books is how much information is packed on each page. The information is presented in a form of a charming story that is easy for a child to relate and connect to.

You might have seen a blog post from a while ago about “How Does My Garden Grow?” book. The story is about a little girl Sophie, who arrives to her grandparents for summer. Grandparents live on a farm. On the first morning Sophie wakes up in a sunlit little attic room to a smell of hot cocoa and pancakes. And after the breakfast the grandpa takes her into a garden and gives her a little garden allotment where Sophie plants her own seeds. As the story goes on a child learns about how different vegetables grow, what is pollination and also about different garden creatures.

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The midsummer tomte and the little rabbits

For kids,
The Midsummer Tomte and the Little Rabbits

You might remember around Christmas I shared one of my most favorite children’s book — Yule Tomte and the Little Rabbits. It is one of those stories that touches deep into my heart and makes me feel like a little child where everything around me is magical again! And I can read over and over and over again with my boys. And now that it is summer, I wanted to share another book about the very same Tomte and little rabbits, but this time it is about Midsummer, or Summer Solstice, celebration.

Midsummer isn’t something that is celebrated in my home culture or here in America, but ever since I was a child I wished there was some special celebration during the summer when we would decorate everything with beautiful flowers, stay up late playing outside all into the night, eating special foods and listening to live music. Wouldn’t that be so beautiful?!

And then I came across this this lovely story that weaves together magical creatures, animals, traditions and seasons into a wonderful and charming story where they celebrate summer, decorate everything with flowers, sing songs and dance all night! Just like I always dreamed. 🙂

So I hope you read on and fall in love with this book as much as we did!

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1001 Things to Spot book series

For kids, , , ,

If you are looking for some fun educational books for your little willings these series are really wonderful. They are among the favorite for both of our boys since their youngest age. What makes these books so great in my option, is that they are reach in content, yet the content is presented in simple ways and easy to grasp portions. And the illustrations are fairly realistic. Each page in one of these books shows an eco-system, such as forest, garden, vegetable patch, ocean, sea shore, desert, etc. And on each page there is a list of creatures that are to be spotted on the page and a number showing how many of them there are.

It aligns with my belief of learning through play is the best way. And here they learn both about natural world and numbers in a playful way.

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Learning about Penguins:
beautiful animated film + books

For kids, , , ,
children books about penguins

Hello, I wanted to share with you a few things we’ve been enjoying and learning about penguins from. It is nothing major, but it is fun, beautiful and educational and is a good introduction into the subject of Antarctica and the fascinating creatures living there.

Our boys’ love for penguins started with a beautiful Russian/Japanese animated film called “Lolo the Penguin”. To parallel their love for Lolo I found them a wonderful little book about penguins that they have been going over and over on their own or with us reading it to them. I also found some good brief videos about penguins on youtube. And lastly we have large Maps book with very beautiful map of Antartica that we reference as well to see where the penguins live and who else live there.

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The Yule Tomte and the Little Rabbits

For kids, , ,
children Christmas story winter books Yuletide story

Here is a post on one of my personal favorite Christmas-themed books of all times! To be perfectly honest, the story is still a bit long for my boys who are 3.5 and 1.5 years old. I tired reading it with Alexandros by breaking it down into parts, but somehow couldn’t quite get him into the story. Part of the thing, he is really into snakes, dinosaurs and maps right now. Currently on his Charismas gift list is a cobra. He understand Santa can’t bring him a real one from India as a cobra just wouldn’t like it, so he says he is OK with that, just wants a toy cobra that is very realistic! Earlier our Christmas list had a live tarantula and an anaconda. 🙂 So…. the cute bunnies aren’t quite cutting it for him as far as the story goes 🙂

But in any case, this story is so good and the illustrations are so wonderful that I think this book is one of those classic ones you can read over and over again throughout your entire childhood and later. I re-read it every winter. So here it is.

children Christmas story winter books Yuletide story
children Christmas story winter books Yuletide story
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Autumn books, part 2:
Books about seasons by Gerda Muller

For kids, , , , , ,
Autumn books for children Gerda Muller

Welcome to my next post in the series on beautiful books about fall for children. This post features books by Gerda Muller. If you look through all my post on children’s books you’ll see that I frequently write about her books for children. They are truly are absolutely wonderful.

What we love about them

  • Incredibly beautiful, realistic and detailed illustrations giving children wealth of information about world around them
  • The stories are always about children’s interaction with nature — walking and playing in the forest, gardening and so on
  • Her numerous books on seasons beautifully present to children the seasonal changes that take place around them, what to look for and fun activities each season has to offer
  • Books also teach children about friendship and family

Children’s Age

Both of my sons were extremely interested in these books from about 5 months old onward. Eleon, who is a bit more independent, could be frequently found going through one of Gerda Muller books for the last many months. And with Ale those were our bed time stories for many months straight!

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Autumn books, part 1:
Books by the magical Elsa Beskow

For kids, , ,
Woody, Haze and Little Peep by Elsa Beskow

This weekend we are having our first cold weather here in Colorado’s Front Range. No frost yet (whew!), but rather cool nights. So the trees turned color everywhere you look to most beautiful jewel tones. As much as I miss summer already I can’t deny of how beautiful this time of year is. Simply breathtaking!

And while browsing Instagram I’ve been seeing some beautiful posts about fall books, so I got inspired to feature some of our books that are themed around autumn. And the first post in this series is about our latest new book — the stunning “Woody, Hazel and Little Pip” by the extraordinary and magical Elsa Beskow. And I also thought the “Children of the Forest” was very fitting here as well, as even though it is not strictly about fall, it is about seasons and it is another gorgeous book by my beloved Elsa Beskow.

So here are just a few pictures I took to share with you just how stunning they are! I highly recommend them as the stories are also absolutely lovely. Please note that these books come as large format books and mini books. I highly recommend to get the large ones, as you really get to appreciate the beauty of illustrations. See below the list of our favorite online stores where you can find these books in both formats.

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Learning about butterflies with children

For kids, , ,
children books about butterflies insects

I originally intended to post all of our insect books (see the Learning About Ants post) throughout the summer. But keeping things according to a plan while being a parent to two little toddlers has not been my strength 🙂 . Fortunately for me, September is a great month for the butterfly study and thus this post, as Monarch butterfly migration happens around mid-September, at least here in Colorado. So instead of completely missing the right time to post this, I happened to accidentally wrap it up at a perfect time to discuss these fascinating natural aviators!

Interesting butterfly facts:

  • If a human baby grew as fast as a caterpillar, it would weigh about 8 tons when it was only two weeks old.
  • Their eyes are made of 6,000 lenses and can see ultraviolet light.
  • Many adult butterflies never excrete waste — they use up all they eat for energy.
  • Butterfly wings move in a figure “8” motion.
  • Monarch butterflies journey from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, a distance of about 2,000 miles, and return to the north again in the spring.
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Learning about ants

For kids, , ,
children books about ants

With so much time spent outside during our most beloved summer months you can’t help but to observe all the different little creatures living alongside with us. In any case, I try to encourage boys to observe and teach them what I know. In general we try to never give boys a negative opinion about a living thing. I tell them that everything has a role to play to keep all that surrounds us healthy and thriving. Even flies, whom I personally really dislike… 🙂 Although to be perfectly honest there are few bugs that boys don’t view so positively (mostly those destroying plants in then garden) and that’s of course due to our own attitudes to them.

Recently we’ve discovered a new serious of beautiful children’s books about insects. Each book has great little bits of information about the respected creature and the illustrations are just most beautiful and realistic. And so I was going to do a post about this series. But it turned out that on some of the insects we’ve already accumulated a little bit of a collection of other good books and even little plastic insect models. So, to give them proper spotlight, I’m doing a post on some of these books separately and then will share all of the other books together.

FUN ANT FACTS:

• Ants have specifics jobs they perform
• The ants we see out and about are all females
• Some ants live as long as 30 years!

So here is our little ants collection. Each of these little books is quite different from the other ones and together they give great overview about these industrious little creatures.

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How does my garden grow

For kids, , ,
How does my garden grow by Gerda Muller, children's book

As the spring season is just around the corner I wanted to share this wonderful children’s book. This book was our favorite for many months when Ale was about 1 year old. We love gardening and so it was very relatable to him. And in its turn the book would make gardening activities and garden creatures even more interesting for him and offer him new knowledge about the garden’s goings.

As all Gerda Muller books it is exceptionally beautiful with very charming, realistic and detailed illustrations. And like all her books it is very informative for the little readers. One thing I especially love about Gerda Muller’s books is that due to the wealth of detail and information we can go back to them later again and again, each time discovering something new or re-discovering already known facts in deeper detail.

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Sustainable guide to Holiday gifts | Children edition

For kids, Sustainable living, , , ,
wooden children toys nontoxic handmade

[ On the photo: Gnomes from Mama Owl; Ostheimer wooden animals from Wooden Wagon ]

How beloved is the beautiful tradition of decorating a tree, lighting the lights on it and waiting for the magical winter-y man to bring us some sweet gifts under the tree! This tradition has survived the rises and demises of kingdoms, cultures and religions. It has changed the name from Yuletide to Christmas and even became a New Year tradition in some countries. Yet, the tradition itself has barely changed in centuries and all of us big and small are excited every year to light up the tree and unwrap our gifts when the time comes. 🙂

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West Coast Wild

For kids, ,
children book about nature alphabet

It seems like Ale’s world is so much about tracks these days — our kitchen is plastered with track stickers, floors are strewn with legos, we watch garbage track every Monday and go to bed with a tractor. So having this beautiful book as one of his favorite bedtime stories makes me particularly happy! He calls it the book about eagles — his favorite animal.

We don’t actually read the book. Instead my little eagle joins Mr. Bear as he digs for mussels under the rocks on the shore and then follows him into the woods to eat together some huckleberries (because that’s what the eagles do, right? ☺️) We ‘fly’ over the ancient forest and listen to the wolves as they howl to each other down below. We watch orcas play in the ocean and we share fish with mama whale. We listen to the rain and watch cougar emerge from the woods at sunset. And as the sun sets over the ocean and sky becomes studded with stars my little eagle lays down in his nest, I cover him with a blanket and we listen to some wolf howls and eagle calls on my iPhone as he is falling asleep. 💕💕💕 (scroll to the bottom to listen to the wolves howl!)

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