I'm so glad Kevin Henkes has taken to writing about the seasons, and I hope he does all of them. Winter Is Here is a poetic exploration of the sights and feelings of winter -- from the way the snow covers the outside world to the many different articles of clothing that a child must put on before going out to play. Gentle text works well for young children, and the bright illustrations bring colors and definition even to descriptions of white snow and transparent ice.

Of course, the best part of this book is that it ends with spring!

Scrounged From: Our local library

Format: Hardcover
Author: Kevin Henkes
Illustrator: Laura Dronzek
Pages: 40
Content Advisory: None

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Winter Bees is a wonderful picture book of Joyce Sidman's poetry, especially fitting for those who live in a cold climate like we do. Have you ever wondered where bees go in the winter? Or voles, or beavers? This book contains a double-page spread on each featured piece of nature (mostly animals), containing a poem and then a few paragraphs of information about how the animal gets through winter, which helps to fill out the information in the poem.

The poetry here is lovely, and full of clever descriptive phrases. Most poems are of moderate length, managing to communicate a clear picture of winter survival without becoming repetitive or overly wordy.

Bees are "an ancient tribe, a hardy scrum... Together, we boil, we teem, we hum."

Snoflakes are "a lattice of stars spinning silently..."

A raven is a "Squawker, Croaker, Alarm-on-the-wind."

The poem about beavers is written as a pantoum, a poetry form that I don't remember encountering before, featuring some neat repetition of lines.

The illustrations here are amazing -- colorful, full of texture and life. I especially love how a long picture of a branch is drawn as moving from autumn to winter at the beginning of the book, and then again at the end it is shown morphing from winter into spring. 

Scrounged From: Our local library

Format: Hardcover
Author: Joyce Sidman
Illustrator: Rick Allen
Pages: 32
Content Advisory: None

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In New England, September and October are especially beautiful seasons -- it gets cooler (and sometimes quite cold) and the leaves turn gorgeous colors before falling. We enjoy apple-picking and harvesting pumpkins before the weather gets really cold. Here are some of our favorite picture books that involve the season of autumn (minus Halloween -- that will be a separate list). 

We really enjoy Wild Child, a book that celebrates the colors and features of autumn by personifying the season as a young girl who doesn't want to go to bed, while Mother Earth helps her with her various fall-like requests before she's finally able to slumber. See my full review here.

In November, by Cynthia Rylant, highlights changes in the world as November comes along. For me, November tends to be when autumn stops being fun, because the leaves are all brown and dead, and the air starts getting cold in earnest. But this is a nice reminder of all the things that are still going on in nature, and the warmth and joy to be found in human gatherings and food.

I love the vibrant colors and contrast of blue with the warmer autumn tones in In the Middle of Fall, by Kevin Henkes. This book observes and meditates on many of the different changes that take place in nature during autumn, and even encourages us to stop and pay attention to the little things due to the inevitability of time moving onward. Fun and lovely, but can also make you think.

Goodbye Summer, Hello Autumn, by Kenard Pak, follows a girl as she walks through her neighborhood observing the changing of the season from summer to autumn. She asks simple questions of the things she sees, which may get a bit repetitive, but works nicely for young children, and includes beautiful fall colors in its illustrations.

Hardscrabble Harvest, by Dahlov Ipcar, is probably not an easy book to find, but I really enjoy the rhyming text that celebrates the culmination of many months of work on a farm -- harvest. While the colors are very clearly "70s" in nature, they actually work quite well for fall. I appreciate that this book touches on some of the difficulties of farming rather than romanticizing it. Singer Priscilla Herdman even turned the text into a song, which can be viewed as a video here.

Wild Child is a fun picture book with beautiful illustrations, in which the season of autumn is personified as a young child who isn't quite ready to go to bed, and so gets a snack (apples, pumpkins), PJs (bright-colored leaves), etc. before finally going to bed (and ushering in winter). When it comes to illustrations I apparently tend to favor cooler tones, because there seem to be a lot of blues in my favorite covers/illustrations, but this is one case where the warmth of reds and oranges is very well presented. I also like the rhythm of the text.

This is also a great example of a metaphor for younger children -- my son kept asking about the child and why her mother (Mother Earth) was made of rocks, etc., so it was a nice opportunity to attempt explaining how one thing can be used to represent something else.

Scrounged From: Our local library

Format: Hardcover
Author: Lynn Plourde
Illustrator: Greg Couch
Pages: 32
Content Advisory: None

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Tree is a beautiful and vibrant celebration of trees and some of their purposes in nature, covering the ways they change throughout the seasons. I love the colors (even though they're occasionally unconventional) and the different aspects of nature that are represented -- birds, bees, rodents, flowers, fruit, etc.

The cut-outs in the pages and the owl make even more visual enjoyment for young kids, and the rhyming text is evocative and linear as it leads us gently through the year, inviting us to observe the different effects that the seasons have on the same tree. 

Scrounged From: Our local library

Format: Hardcover
Author: Patricia Hegarty
Illustrator: Britta Teckentrup
Pages: 32
Content Advisory: None

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