Precious Water: A Book of Thanks

Review also includes:

Little Apple: A Book of Thanks, 978-0735817814

Good Bread: A Book of Thanks, 978-0735815179

These books celebrate the aesthetic beauty and value of three natural resources: water, fruit and bread. The written text is lucid but quite spare so it is the detail in the illustrations which is likely to encourage curiosity and thus to give rise to talk. Little Apple and Good Bread are strong visual narratives which show how the plant develops, growing root systems below ground and shoots above ground. Children’s wonder at the magnificence and complexity of natural resources is encouraged by the richness of the pictures – for example we are shown skilfully drawn predators of the maturing plants.

In Little Apple we discover ‘a secret’: there is a star at the centre of the fruit if you cut it in half. A close-up shows the brown apple pips inside. I would be reaching for an apple to show the child or children the star! Good Bread presents an historic, romantic view of the agricultural process; it is splendid to see the playful fieldmice and the beautiful field flowers, but it would be difficult to find such a field on a present day farm to show a child on a country walk. We see a child grinding flour from grains of wheat and baking bread and then an affecting image of the hands of children from many countries reaching out towards a loaf of bread. This picture and the accompanying text – ‘I hope that other children have bread like this to eat’ – could lead to profound talk about why some people do not have enough food.

Precious Water shows landscapes with and without water: we see scenes of verdant pastures and cascading rivers contrasting with terrains of bare rock and barren earth with stark animal skeletons. The author and illustrator move skilfully from generalisations – some water is salt, some water becomes ice and snow – to one child’s use of water to quench the thirst of her pet cat and to keep her plants alive. It is such imaginative leaps from the particular to the general and back again which help make these richly illustrated books so appealing and so likely to help children to think and learn, especially if there is a sensitive adult to help make their wonderings and reflections explicit.