September Virtual Book Club - Lois Ehlert

When September's author Lois Ehlert was announced for the Virtual Book Club at Toddler Approved I searched for her books on-line and was so pleased that most of her books have to do with nature.We watched this interesting clip on you tube about Lois Ehlert which made us more familiar with her work. Our family loves anything that has to do with nature and we try to introduce it in different ways to K and L. It happened that this Summer we had planted some herbs in some pots on our roof garden  to see the process of their growth from seed to edible food. It was K who planted the seeds and cared for them during the hot summer days. So after reading several books by Lois Ehlert we focused on Growing Vegetable Soup as it was so related to what we were actually doing.

This book focuses about vegetable gardening, the planting, weeding, harvesting, washing, chopping and cooking. Since we were in the peak of our hot summer days instead of soup we used our home grown basil to make into pesto.The photos show the process we used to make our home made pesto

Home grown organic herbs ... marjoram,rosemary, thyme, mint, sage  and basil

Collecting leaves 

... more leaves

Ingredients ready for preparing pesto

All set to start process

.. mince the basil

.. all ingredients blended

.. homemade pesto

..pasta with home made pesto

.... ready to eat!!!

Researching about Lois Ehlert we learnt that she has a very creative book creation proess. She begins with a "dummy book"made from pencil drawings. Then assesses to determing the subject matter of the new book. Once she has a topic, she will do background research to learn more. Then she will begin her artwork, which involves cutting out each piece individually and then gluing them on the pages of her book.


For some craft we used her technique of colourful cut-paper-style illustrations to create wonderful pictures related to the book. K and L used various craft material to create their pictures.

L testing textures to create a picture

K decided to do a picture of the pesto pasta

Penne with Pesto craft version

Collage of the Basil plant 

Basil plant

List of materials used for craft 

K enjoys writing and she also wished to write the recipe for the pesto. So I wrote words for her and she chose what to include in the recipe.

We are so interested in Louis Ehlert books and would love to know more of her books trough  the blog hop  featuring  her differtent books.  If  you are interested follow this blog hop too.