Julie Finn
Outside: A Guide to Discovering Natures is a nature book that’s perfect for any kid who loves crafting with natural materials or just playing outdoors.
Feathers and leaves. Rocks and shells. Sticks and flowers. Acorns and sand.
If you know a kid who loves nature crafts, then it’s worthwhile to provide that kid with a guidebook to the natural world, one that shows her the processes that form all the things that she enjoys creating with.
In Outside: A Guide to Discovering Nature (which I received free from a publicist), you get all of that, along with handy, hand-drawn illustrations and diagrams, all written to the older child.
Outside gives factual information about nature, such as how rocks form, and what the skeletal system of a bird looks like, but it also provides the knowledge that a person needs to explore all types of natural environments–depending on how you were raised and where you live, this is something that you might not know. A city kid, especially, may well not realize how easy it is to get lost in the woods, or how important a flashlight is for exploring after dark, or even that you shouldn’t pull up plants just for the sake of doing so.
Outside gives that information, but it also includes a lyrical quality to its language, and an artistic style to its illustrations, that a tween or young teen, in particular, might appreciate. Readers are encouraged to do things like lie on the ground underneath a tree to look and listen to nature, and to ponder their identity as mammals in a worldwide community of mammals with similar features.
For the crafty kid, there are, of course, various nature projects interspersed with the informative and inspirational. These are more suggestions than tutorials, as when the reader is asked to sketch various mammals for fun, or make molds of the diverse textures of rocks, paint a sunset, or construct an animated model of the moon cycle.
There aren’t any super-crafty projects specified, but a kid who loves that kind of thing can use this book to figure out the natural history of her preferred nature craft supplies.
Photo credit: interior copy of Outside image via Booktopia
