They were delightful to read aloud, the kind of poems you can read over and over again to find new turns of phrase and tricks of meaning. The work of a true wordsmith– and nature lover and word collector. The pictures are lush watercolors, with rich colors, a feast for the eyes. These are fun because they almost all have other plants and animals hidden in the picture, fun to look at for a good long time, reveling in the details. The third spread is a nature scene, showing the animal or plant in its habitat. The poem is an acrostic with the first letter of each stanza spelling out the lost word again. The specimen is framed against a plain gold background. The plant has all the parts, leaves and flowers and roots. The second spread has a poem and a beautiful drawing of the plant or animal, fit for a guidebook. Each includes a jumble of letters, most of them gold, but hidden among them the letters of the “lost” word in a contrasting color that matches the plant or animal, blue for bluebells, yellow for dandelions, green for fern. The first spread is a sketch that includes a hint of the plant or animal: an outline, a feather, a line of footprints.
What a lovely way to learn more about those living things we may never see live and in person, no matter how much we tramp about in our local nature preserves.Įach of the twenty words gets three two-page spreads. This is the countryside of Swallows and Amazons brought under the magnifying glass: adders and ferns and heather.
So while the kids do know the words, they relish seeing and learning more about larks and bluebells and heather, which they have only encountered in books. That said, as this is a British book, some of these plants and animals are not native to our New England area. You want this book not as a vocabulary enricher, not because you and your children don’t know the words, but because the book is beautiful, a paradise for nature lovers and art lovers and word lovers. So why do they need this book? These words have not been lost to us.īut this book isn’t really about learning a handful of words that were dropped from the dictionary. They already know what all these animals and plants are. Especially as these words are not words that are unknown to my kids, who read widely and well. I tend to roll my eyes a little bit at the earnestness of “rescuing” words. And so a book was born, a book of poems and pictures to highlight some of those “lost” words.īut… this premise was not enough to sell me on this book.
Someone noticed that 40 nature words– like fern and heather and kingfisher–were dropped from the Oxford Junior Dictionary in favor of tech words like blog and voicemail. The Lost Words: A Spell Book by Robert Macfarlane, illustrated by Jackie Morris.
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