“My Leaf Book” By Monica Wellington {Book Review & Craft}

It’s no secret that I’m a fan of Monica Wellington’s books. The first book I found by chance in a bookstore. It was Apple Farmer Annie which is still one of my all-time favorite picture books. I had the opportunity to interview Monica when Colors for Zena was released.

So you can imagine how excited I was when I discovered yesterday her publisher had sent me a copy of her brand new book! Let me introduce you to My Leaf Book and share a simple craft to go along with it.

Title: My Leaf Book
Author: Monica Wellington
Publisher: Penguin Random House

My Leaf Book

My Leaf Book is the sweet tale of a young girl who goes to an arboretum to collect leaves in the fall. She discovers leaves of various shapes and colors and puts them into her leaf book.

The book is full of Monica’s unique style. The colors are vibrant and the illustrations leap off the page.

The book is also full of learning opportunities that include recognizing characteristics that are helpful in identifying certain types of leaves. Several of the pages include educational information in small sidebars that the parent or teacher can bring up while reading the book aloud. (You can see one below in the lower right corner of the page.)

Children are introduced to a wide variety of trees including the honey locust, ginkgo, sweet gum, birch, willow, cherry, sassafras and more. Monica makes the leaf shapes memorable by showing how they resemble certain shapes a child would already be familiar with (such as a star or mitten).

Although the book is written for ages 3-5, I think most children in early elementary would enjoy it. Caroline is almost nine and she spent quite a bit of time pouring over the illustrations (as well as proclaiming the darlingness of the little girl’s dog! LOL!).

My Leaf Book Colorful Leaves Fall Craft

This is a very simple but colorful art project!

You can see from the picture that we used a blue piece of paper for the background, green paper for the land, green paper for the tree, brown paper for the trunk, and red, yellow and orange paper for the leaves. We used scrapbooking cardstock from my stash, but this could easily be done with construction paper as well.

Our tree was inspired by Monica’s colorful illustrations, but we created a much simpler version that is more appropriate for children. All of the shapes in our project can be easily cut by children.

When you read the book, you will see that there are many ideas for making leaves including hearts, stars, and mittens. A parent could choose another shape featured in the book if she chose to do so.

I hope you enjoy reading My Leaf Book and creating a colorful tree full of lovely leaves!