What Can You Do with a Rock?
by Pat Zietlow Miller (Author)
With all the endless, creative fun a child can have with a rock, the best thing one can do with one is to share it with a friend. Includes facts about rocks and rock collecting.
From award-winning author Pat Zietlow Miller, a timeless story about creativity, exploration, and friendship. What can you do with a rock? You can skip them. You can sort them. Best of all, you can share them. Rocks are simple, but the things you can do with them are endless. Rocks can build, sparkle, and tell a story. They can be memories. They can even be a little bit magic.
This ode to curiosity and creative play from New York Times bestselling author Pat Zietlow Miller and acclaimed illustrator Katie Kath is bound to inspire.
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School Library Journal
PreS-Gr 2-What a rocking picture book this is! With a bit of geology, a bit of psychology, and a lot of fun, the author and illustrator give us a small active person of indeterminate gender and neutral pronouns in the text (and longish flippy blue hair in the illustrations), who delightedly progresses from kicking rocks, to picking them up, to skipping, dropping, sorting, studying, creating with them-and finally, using them as a stepping stone to friendship. Harking back to such gems as A Hole Is to Dig, this book in its final pages provides a quick intro to geology and some further reading, with both fiction and nonfiction suggestions. In the animated, realistic, blue-washed watercolors, perspectives vary and figures are anchored by thick, fuzzy lines. Landscapes and interiors are uncluttered, but detailed enough to convince. Many compositions featuring a path with an entry- or exit-point help to reinforce the reader-oriented viewpoint. The clear, simple, second-person text offers encouragement and elides gender, but eventually the main character and brown-skinned friend with hair in two meatball-shaped buns are wearing what most children will perceive as girls' bathing suits. VERDICT A winning blend of science, playfulness, and the warmth of personal connections, with lively, engaging illustrations, this book deserves rock-star status
Copyright 2021 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
Publisher's Weekly
"Some people don’t notice rocks." But a light-skinned child with blue hair and an eager expression is the very model of a rock connoisseur in Zietlow Miller and Kath’s picture book, which offers a litany of answers to the titular question. As watercolor illustrations celebrate the child’s passion-showing rocks in piles, boxes, and natural settings-text reveals that a rock can be kicked, skipped, dropped, sorted, studied, and even used as a currency of connection, among other autonomy-building options ("Should your tiny white rock go with other tiny rocks? With other white rocks?... Only you can decide"). The book’s premise stretches a little thin when reaching for metaphor ("People are like rocks. Some sparkle right away"), but this is a lively, emotionally resonant celebration of rocks as well as humans’ ways of connecting with and learning about the natural world. Ages 4-8.
Copyright 2021 Publisher’s Weekly, LLC Used with permission.
Pat Zietlow Miller is a children's book lover and one of the creative forces behind the blog Picture Book Builders where she reviews books for young readers. Her picture books include the New York Times bestseller Be Kind, Sophie's Squash, Wherever You Go, The Quickest Kid in Clarksville, and Remarkably You, among many others. She lives in Madison, Wisconsin.
Suzy Lee is a Korean picture book author and illustrator. She has published over thirty books. Her critically acclaimed work includes the books Mirror, Wave, Shadow, and the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award winner Open This Little Book. She is the winner of the 2022 Hans Christian Andersen Award.JUV051000 - Juvenile Fiction | Imagination & Play
JUV029010 - Juvenile Fiction | Nature & the Natural World | Environment
Creative ability
Rocks
Play
Sharing
