We Planted a Tree

by Diane Muldrow

Overview

We planted a tree and it grew up,

While it reached for the sky and the sun. . . .

In this simple poem illustrated by award winner Bob Staake, two young families in two very different parts of the world plant a tree. As the trees flourish, so do the families . . . while trees all over the world help clean the air, enrich the soil, and give fruit and shade.

With a nod to Kenya’s successful Green Belt Movement, Diane Muldrow’s elegant text celebrates the life and hope that every tree—from Paris to Brooklyn to Tokyo—brings to our planet. Perfect for young readers!

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780375983047
Publisher:	Random House Children's Books
Publication date:	10/13/2010
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	40
Lexile:	AD620L (what's this?)
File size:	7 MB
Age Range:	3 - 7 Years

About the Author

DIANE MULDROW is an editorial director at Golden Books and the New York Times bestselling author of the Everything I Need to Know I Learned From a Little Golden Book series. She has written dozens of children’ s books, including How Do Giraffes Take Naps?, How Do Lions Say I Love You?, How Do Penguins Play?, and the Dish series for middle graders. She lives in Brooklyn. Learn more at dianemuldrow.com.

BOB STAAKE'S book The Red Lemon was a New York Times Best Illustrated Children’s Book of the Year. A prolific author and illustrator of children's books, Staake is also very well-known for his many New Yorker covers. He lives on Cape Cod. Learn more at BobStaake.com and on Twitter @bobstaake.

Editorial Reviews

Using a quote from Wangari Maathai as a springboard, Muldrow's poem delineates the tree's seasonal cycles and celebrates its benefits for living creatures. In natural language, the narrator adopts a global view, lauding her subject's abilities to cool the earth, clean the air and prevent erosion ("The tree kept the soil from blowing away- / Now rainwater could stay in the earth"). Staake is an accomplished illustrator with many New Yorker covers under his belt. His ultra-stylized depictions rove from Brooklyn to a presumed African plain, to Tokyo, Paris, New England and possibly the Cinque Terre (though one where apples and lemons yield concurrently), riding roughshod over the poet's delicate allusions. The stripped-down computer-generated pictures vie with the ecology-focused subject rather than extending it, and the pie-eyed, inane expressions of the humans depicted around the globe flirt visually with the stereotypical cultural caricatures common to the mid-century European advertising posters that the illustrator credits as influences. Consider instead other children's works inspired by Maathai, such as Donna Jo Napoli's Mama Miti, illustrated by Kadir Nelson (2010). (Picture book. 4-8)

Kirkus Reviews