Simple Saturday

Color me grateful. I have had the great honor of creating a Teacher Craft Guide for Nancy Bo Flood's incredible non-fiction picture book entitled From Sand to Stone and Back Again. Working on this project brought me back to the wonderful days in my Montessori classroom sorting through biome nomenclature cards with a wee one by my side. You can relate to the wee one, I imagine. Not the cards. Let me explain.

Nancy's prose guides the reader through a vivid, colorful, dramatic, dynamic, transformational journey depicting the life-cycle of sand. Paired with Tony Kuyper's incredible photographs, this book is lively beyond words. Sand? Stone? Lively? Flood pulls it off. Really.

While reading, I could hear boulders crashing, arroyos swishing full of water after a rain, and feel the eerie awesomeness of slot canyons and hoo doos and goblins. With the child and the biome cards, I would dramatize each concept. No additional drama is needed with From Sand to Stone and Back Again in hand. The book is just that good.

Throughout Sand to Stone, Nancy skillfully brings the reader into the story. She reminds the child that they, too, are changing. That even the smallest grain of sand has monumental transformational power! Flood found a way to both inspire the child reader while presenting a non-fictional world with passionate perfection. Bravo!

My quest was to write a Teacher Guide that would celebrate the splendor of Nancy's and Tony's fine work. To do so, I fell back upon my Montessori roots by featuring Kruper's photos in a manipulative vocabulary game. Because I, too, desire to give the child the physical, tactile, transformational experience of changing sand to stone and back again, I lead the teacher through a sequential series of wonderfully messy craft activities. (And I had  BLAST doing this!) Lastly, to give the child an opportunity to express themselves through writing, a poetic creative writing lesson serves as a wrap up.

To learn more about From Sand to Stone and Back Again, read this fabulous Cynsations blog post about Nancy. To review my Teacher Guide you may click here.