Ready Readers

BUGGING OUT

By Sheila Oliveri

All summer long, insects, birds and animals punctuate the verdure of area gardens with their beautiful hues. In that light, Ready Readers recommends two books that both feature the trademark painted-paper collage illustrations of Lois Ehlert, sure to satisfy all youthful entomologists among us.

The first, Ten Little Caterpillars, pairs Ehlert with writer Bill Martin Jr., the duo who (with John Archambault) previously produced the modern children’s classic Chicka Chicka Boom Boom. In this counting book, Martin and Ehlert celebrate the flora and fauna of a summer garden, introducing 10 distinctly different caterpillars that eventually emerge into unique creatures floating through a kaleidoscope of garden blooms. Ehlert’s attention to detail should make this book a perfect fit for various ages and stages of readers: Young children should love the bright colors and textured images, while beginning readers sound out the bold rhyming text, leaving older enthusiasts to study the labeled parts of plants and insects pictured.

Ehlert both writes and illustrates the month’s second recommendation, Waiting for Wings, which provides a colorful profusion of shapes, textures and patterns matched with interesting vocabulary and science facts in its depiction one of nature’s most magical transformations, the butterfly lifecycle. The story unfolds as a book-within-a-book. It begins with oversized pages lavishly decorated with purple and green blooms, before focusing on smaller pages that depict the egg-caterpillarpupa-butterfly metamorphosis. Full-size pages resume once the butterfly emerges, and they’re jammed with different butterfly and flower species accompanied by lyrical text.

Both stories should inspire creative kids, so parents, gather your paper, crayons and paint – or maybe some sidewalk chalk – and help your own young naturalist or naturalists depict the bounty of your family’s backyard! ln Visit readyreaders.org and join the effort to bring a lifetime of literacy, learning and love to our community’s most vulnerable children.