All About Patterns

by Elizabeth Rusch, Elizabeth Goss (Illustrator)

Overview

An enlightening picture book exploration about how patterns fill and shape our everyday lives. This mindful meditation challenges kids to see the world differently.

What do you know about patterns? There are simple alternating patterns and more complex ones that spin and spread out. There are patterns in stories and patterns in music. When you dance, you're making patterns with your whole body.

You might even notice a comforting pattern to your day. When that pattern is broken, everything can feel chaotic. But sometimes breaking a pattern can make room for a new one worth repeating!

A thought-provoking and visually stunning exploration of the math, art, and emotion of patterns.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781632893253
Publisher:	Charlesbridge
Publication date:	04/29/2025
Series:	All About Noticing
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	32
File size:	28 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.
Age Range:	4 - 8 Years

About the Author

Elizabeth Rusch is the award-winning author of All About Nothing, All About Color, and more than two dozen other children’s books, including A Day with No Crayons, Zee Grows a Tree, Volcano Rising, and Mario and the Hole in the Sky, winner of the AAAS/Subaru Prize for Excellence in Science Books, the Green Earth Book Award, the Cook Prize, and the Golden Kite Award.

Elizabeth Goss is an illustrator, author, and papercutter. Her picture book My Way West won the Paterson Prize for Books for Young People, and All About Nothing was selected for the Society of Illustrators Original Art Show. A proud member of the Guild of American Papercutters, Elizabeth teaches art workshops across the Pacific Northwest.
www.lizabethgoss.com

Editorial Reviews

2024-11-09
Meditative observations on patterns in art, in nature, and in life.

Continuing their efforts to nudge readers toward greater mindfulness, Rusch and Goss follow upAll About Nothing (2023) andAll About Color (2024) by pointing to the ubiquity of patterns. “What do you know about patterns?” the author asks. She defines the concept as anything that repeats, while Goss depicts a set of inward-looking children diverse in race and age—some lining up seeds and other small items, others painting images of rows and spirals, examining pine cones, dancing, playing a guitar, or sharing books (the collaborators’ previous ones) with parents. When changes such as the birth of a newborn sibling break comfortable patterns, “everything feels chaotic,” but only, reassuringly, until a new pattern can be worked out. Some of the gnomic claims (“Stories can have patterns”) beg for interpretation or discussion, and even with additional context, many children will have trouble with the author’s mini-discourse on tessellations in the backmatter. Still, more reflective young audiences will still get at least the general drift, and as a takeaway, the closing insight that our brains “love finding patterns” is as universally true as it is easy to comprehend. Some domestic scenes feature a multiracial family with two little ones.

A sketchy introduction to an important, if abstract, idea.(Informational picture book. 6-8)

Kirkus Reviews