Lulu Loves Flowers (Lola Plants a Garden in the US ) written by Anna McQuinn, illustrated by Rosalind Beardshaw is perfect in every way.
That’s all you really need to know. It’s that simple.
It’s the tale of a young child who plants some seeds and watches them grow. This in itself isn’t ground-breaking; there are plenty of other lovely books out there that have the same basic premise, but this one just does it so well, so delightfully, so cleverly it’s become my number one book for gardening with kids.
First up, there’s the fact that Lulu gets her inspiration for her garden from books.
Poetry is what kicks it all off, but then she uses non-fiction books to learn more. You can see how this matches Playing by the book’s ethos so perfectly – with ideas coming from books, sparking more reading of books, embedding stories and ideas into each of our lives. One example of this which I especially love is depicted in the endpages of this book, where first you get the original version of the nursery rhyme ‘Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary’ but at the end of the book you get a re-written version, Lulu’s version. Lulu has taken the poem and really made it her own.
Next I love this book because it’s about something completely unrelated to diversity (it is not an “issues” book), and yet it does wonders for inclusion.
In a way it saddens me that simply depicting a non-white family doing something as ordinary as gardening is radical. But mostly I’m delighted to see a family (who just happen to be black) doing ordinary family things together.
And yes, I love this book because its about doing things together as a family; getting crafty, getting creative, Dad included! Going these projects isn’t difficult, and any effort involved is more than repaid through the joy of the time and experiences shared.
Beardshaw’s painting illustrations are full of colour without ever being garish. She’s got a real eye for clothing, and I just love how she’s captured Lulu’s curly hair. On one level that’s such a small thing, but on another I feel it really shows an authenticity in her illustrations.
I think the scene above is extra special. Last year the School Library Journal published a fascinating article about research showing How Cross-Racial Scenes in Picture Books Build Acceptance. Although the stats are based on the US picture book market, they still speak volumes elsewhere in the world:
Fewer than 10 percent of books published in 2013 featured children of color, according to statistics gathered by the Cooperative Children’s Books Center.
Even more rare are the picture books that depict children making positive connections across racial differences. This absence sends a subtle message to children, as if we were telling them, “It’s okay to only play with children who are like you” or that “children like you don’t play with children who are racially different from you.”
[…]
In a study investigating how kids respond to cross-racial depictions in picture books, Aronson and her colleagues randomly assigned children to two groups. The first group was read books that depicted children from different races playing together and having fun. The second group was read similar books, but with children from only one racial group.
After six weeks, they found that children in the first group reported greater comfort and interest in playing across difference than children in the second group. Perhaps even more importantly, the first group reported that these positive attitudes remained three months after the study was completed.
We NEED more books like Lulu Loves Flowers, not just so black kids can see themselves in picture books but also so that kids who aren’t black can see them too, and can see kids, people getting on whatever their skin colour. Lulu Loves Flowers is a book for everyone, and should not be shelved only with the “Diverse/inclusive books”.
Lulu Loves Flowers is the latest of several books Anna McQuinn has written about this family. All are joyous, full of smiles, reflecting everyday experiences of young children and highlighting things that really matter – not only but especially – with little ones: Spending time together, reading and sharing stories. If you’ve live or work with kids under 5 I think they should form an essential part of your library.
Although Lulu Loves Flowers may be mostly aimed at younger kids, my 10 year old wanted to make her own garden to go with the book, using bell charms (we got ours from this etsy seller) and a fabulous bookish planter we found in the local junk shop.
There’s nothing like making a miniature fairy garden!
We also thought about a crafty project which younger kids could easily do too and came up with the idea of making silver bells for our garden out of old yoghurt pots. Using acrylic paint we first coated our clean pots in silver and when dry we drizzled them with PVA glue and sprinkled glitter over them. (Acrylic is a good paint to use on yoghurt pots as it sticks better to the plastic. If you’ve access to lots of cardboard egg boxes you could also use them to make bells, and then poster paint would work fine.)
We hung our bells up in our cherry tree, in the hope that the movement and sparkle will keep the pigeons from eating our fruit (yes, we live optimistically!).
I wonder if we’ll end up keeping the pigeons away by attracting lots of magpies instead 
Whilst making our silver bells we listened to:
Rolling in the Deep by Adele… but rearranged for handbells!
Eye of the Tiger (one of my kids’ favourite) also on handbells
Harry Potter theme music played on Carillon bells
Of course there are also lots of recordings of ‘Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary’, but many of them are a bit dreary. One of the more upbeat ones is that recorded by Saindhavi.
Other activities which go well with reading Lulu Loves Flowers include:
Watching these time lapse videos of a seeds germinating.
Using any left over seeds and sead packets to make a seed book using ziplock (sandwich) bags – I think this would be especially enjoyable to look back on when the seeds you have planted have grown and you can compare them to the tiny packet of potential they’ve come from.
Making your own Mary, Mary doll, like Lulu does. Here’s a round up of tutorials from Hello, Wonderful.
Have you and the kids planted anything recently in the garden?
Disclosure: I received a free review copy of from the book’s publisher
This fabulous illustration by Rosalind Beardshaw features the lovely Lulu from a delightful series of books written by Anna McQuinn, and seems just perfect for National Libraries Day.
I’ll be spending much of today at my local library, running this month’s book group for 8-12 year olds (you may recall I wrote about it here). Today’s theme is “funny books” and as well as exploring a whole host of joke books and other books to make us giggle, we’ll be having a library wide cracker hunt.
Thanks to the power of Twitter many authors and illustrators have shared their favourite jokes with me, and I’ve packed them up inside crackers, along with a brief bio of each author/illustrator (and perhaps a sweet or two…). Once the kids have found all the crackers around the library, the book group will be looking for as many books as possible by each of the authors/illustrators who shared a joke with us. The more books they find, the more treats they win!
We all get to laugh. We all discover new books. We all get to have a great time in our local library! HURRAH!
And if you can’t make it to your local library today, treat yourself instead to How the Library (not the Prince) saved Rapunzel, written by Wendy Meddour and illustrated by Rebecca Ashdown Petrie, a rhyming, funny, modern-day take on the much loved fairy tale which does a splendid job of celebrating – in both words and pictures – just how brilliant libraries are.
If you were invited to design a school library launch, how would you go about it? What events would you want to facilitate? Who would you want to involve?
These questions have been very much on my mind since the start of the year, for designing and delivering a school library launch is exactly what I have been asked to do by a local infant school. Can you imagine how excited I feel?
It’s an honour to be asked and trusted by the school to design a whole day of activities and I’ve loved every minute of it so far. Library Launch day is February 12th and now we’re counting down the days…
With apologies to NASA, whose original image I’ve modified.
Having got to the stage where I’ve everything prepped and in place, I wanted to share my plans and resources with you as many of them are easily replicable in families, in classrooms, in clubs, anywhere would you might like to help young children and their families get excited about books. And with World Book Day coming up next month, you could take any of these ideas and use them to celebrate perhaps my favourite day of the year
Today I’ll share the activities the 3-5 year olds will be getting up to, and next week I’ll share the session plans for Year 1 (5-6 year olds) and Year 2 (6-7 year olds), although I believe many of the activities could be adapted to work with children of any age.
We were keen to get as many children into the new library during the day as possible so each class of 3-5 year olds will spend one session going on a treasure hunt for book characters in the library. The basis of this session with be Katie Cleminson’s Otto the Book Bear, in which a bear in a book steps off the pages and into real life. Having read the book, kids (in pairs) will be given a treasure card to identify which books and book characters they need to find in the library.
Some of the sheets of cards kids will be given so they know which characters to hunt for in the library
No doubt 30 kids hunting 30 soft toys is going to be quite chaotic! Once all the characters are found, the session will finish with a reading of one of the books found by the kids during the session.
A couple of trips to charity shops resulted in a good number of soft toys that either were actual book characters (for example I found Paddington Bear, Pooh, and Poppy Cat without even really looking), then I raided my kids’ soft toys and chose ones which matched (near enough) great books. So, for example, I am borrowing a soft toy squirrel and teaming it up with A First Book of Nature, by Nicola Davies, illustrated by Mark Hearld.
I supplemented these with a few extra official character soft toys (who wouldn’t love the excuse to get a Mog cat or Tiger who came tea toy?). Castlemere Books, based in the US, is the most comprehensive site I found for official book character soft toys, though I didn’t end up using them because of shipping costs to the UK.
Some of the characters kids will be searching for in the library!
On returning to their classrooms the kids will paint/colour their own bookshelves and Otto the bear. You can download the shelves here and the bear here.
The second session will be based around Lulu loves Stories by Anna McQuinn and Rosalind Beardshaw (follow the link to read it for free online). This is a gentle story about a child who is taken to the library every Saturday by her father. Each book they read together inspires different sorts of play, from being on a farm (having read about Old Macdonald) to making a pretend aeroplane (having read a story about going on an adventure).
Each table in the classroom will be set up with a different activity taken from Lulu Loves Stories: there will be one with princess dressing up, one with farm animals and one with construction toys. A fourth table will be set up for each child to create their own library to take home, by selecting and gluing lots of images of children’s book covers onto these shelves.
I’ve spent a fair few evenings cutting up old publishers’ catalogues to create enough “library stock”, but other than time in preparation, this activity has been very cheap to prepare with many publishers willing to send catalogues upon request. (If you were working with older kids you could simply give them the catalogues and ask them to do some fantasy shopping – seeing what books they themselves would chose for their library would no doubt be very informative.)
On a fifth table children will be able to cut out Lulu bookplates. These are available as part of an activity guide on the US publisher’s website. Don’t be confused by the name change – Lulu (in the UK) becomes known as Lola (in the US), but this doesn’t affect the bookplates.
This session will be rounded off by reading Lulu reads to Zeki also by Anna McQuinn and Rosalind Beardshaw, which is a simply delightful (and funny) window into a later stage in Lulu’s life;she now has a younger brother, and is passing on the love of books her father instilled in her to little Zeki, reading to him whenever possible.
The third session for the 3-5 year olds will open with a reading of I Love My Little Story Book by Anita Jeram, which is all about the delights you can find inside different books, and the various places they can transport you to.
Each child will have the opportunity to make their own bunny which comes with a hidden story book of its own. It’s a simple collage activity to make the bunny out of an envelope, a pompom, some dried spaghetti, googly eyes and cardboard ears, all stuck on to an envelope, inside which each child will find a blank mini book (blue to match the one in the story). Kids will be encouraged to make the story book their own with whatever mark-making they like.
The mini books are each made from a sheet of A4 paper, using this technique, my favourite way of making small paper books as it requires no sticking or stapling.
As well as there being tables set up with fairy tale activities (castles and knights to play with, dressing up, plastic animals in a forest play scene) kids will also be able to colour in and cut out several book plates designed by Anita Jeram.
These are all available to freely download (as long as you’re not using them for commercial purposes) from this brilliant website, http://www.myhomelibrary.org/, created by former Children’s Laureate, Anne Fine.
If time allows a reading of I like books by Anthony Browne will finish off this session. This is a very simple introduction to different types of books with just one sentence on each page. It’s a great reminder that there are all different sorts of books you can enjoy reading, not just story books.
The fourth session of the day will be based around an all time classic, Charlie Cook’s Favourite Book by Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler. Once the story has been shared, each child will be given their own cardboard treasure chest to embellish with sticky jewels. I sourced some great treasure chests (from http://www.littlecraftybugs.co.uk/) so large that kids will be able to store favourite books inside them.
Elsewhere in the classroom during this session kids will have the opportunity to dig for buried treasure in a sandpit, make aliens out of green playdough, and play with plastic dragons, as well as the chance to colour in this Charlie Cook sheet which you can download from the official Gruffalo website, or to draw their favourite book on this Charlie Cook activity sheet from the US Scholastic website.
This session will be wrapped up with a reading of We are in a book by Mo Willems – a perfect book for this age range where the oldest kids may well be able to join in with reading this funny story about what characters in a book think about their readers.
And as well as all of this, all classes will have a session with the award winning author who is coming to join the school for the day… but more about this in a later post!
I'm sure I've shared of libraries many times over, but I had to share a new book I found (at my library, of course). Lola at the Library, written by Anna McQuinn and illustrated by Rosalind Beardshaw shares a little girl's love for and routine at her library.
The story teaches a little about how the library works and what you might find there outside of just the aisles of books: music, storytime, socializing, community. Rosalind's illustrations are so charming - and she shows such care in painting gestures in hands and feet, even with her loose, stylized characters.
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Author:
We’re fairly new to the Lulu stories but they’re wonderful. I love any book that gets children involved in gardening and it’s a fantastic idea to base the story around a nursery rhyme
Lulu and Zeki and wonderful characters and if you haven’t read all their stories yet Catherine you’re in for a treat
‘We NEED more books like Lulu Loves Flowers, not just so black kids can see themselves in picture books but also so that kids who aren’t black can see them too, and can see kids, people getting on whatever their skin colour. Lulu Loves Flowers is a book for everyone, and should not be shelved only with the “Diverse/inclusive books”.’ – Yes, this! We don’t live in a very diverse area and so books like this are important, people just being and getting on.