Out of School and Into Nature:

The Anna Comstock Story by Suzanne Slade, illustrated by Jessica Lanan c.2017, Sleeping Bear Press $16.99/$20.99 Canada 32 pages

 

What will you do when school is out for the summer? Will you hang around at home, playing every video game ever made? Maybe you’d rather go to summer camp. How about a family vacation, a trip to see Grandma, hiking, swimming? Or, will you tromp around outside, as in the new book Out of School and Into Nature: The Anna Comstock Story by Suzanne Slade, illustrated by Jessica Lanan?

Almost from the day she was born, Anna craved the outdoors. She wanted to feel it in her hands. She wanted to touch it with her toes, and was almost always barefooted. She wanted to know all about frogs and  toads and trees and water. She studied, watched and “discovered nature’s secrets.”  Anna’s mother encouraged a love of nature by teaching Anna about the wildflowers in the meadow and the stars in the night sky. Anna’s appreciation of nature grew until she knew she wanted to go to college to study the subject, but  there was one problem: At the time when she was a young woman, girls weren’t supposed to go to college.

They were “supposed to get married after high school,” but Anna headed for college anyhow, where she studied insects and plants, and she began drawing them to better share what she’d learned.

Her professors were impressed. They started using her artwork in their classes, and farmers found her drawings most helpful in identifying bugs on their farms. Soon, Anna was known as an expert in nature.

One day, though, she learned something that shocked her – many small schools didn’t teach their students anything about the outdoors. Knowing that had to be fixed, she began “teaching the teachers … and wrote lessons about nature’s marvelous mysteries.”

She encouraged teachers to take their students outside to learn, so the children might hold nature in their hands and feel it with their feet. And with that, as Anna noted, the children “wanted to learn more.”

Your grade-schooler has a whole summer stretching ahead of her. She’s dreaming of the fun she’ll have indoors, so now’s the time to spur her interest in the outdoors by giving her Out of School and Into Nature.

Starting with nature expert Anna Comstock’s early childhood, author Suzanne Slade and artist Jessica Lanan vividly portray life in the mid-1800s, when kids could openly explore the outdoors with few restrictions. From there, Slade moves on to Comstock’s reach for an education and a career, with emphasis on the difficulties Comstock faced and with a subtle empowerment message for girls.

Finally, be sure you spend a few minutes with the books’ last pages; there, Slade offers “More About Anna,” where children and parents can truly dig into the life of this remarkable woman.

This is a great book for 6- to 10-yearold couch potatoes, or for kids who may anticipate a season spent in the country. For them, or for a child who’s been assigned

a book before classes start again, Out of School and Into Nature is a fine summer read.

Terri Schlichenmeyer has been reading since she was three years old and never goes anywhere without a book. She lives on a hill in Wisconsin with two dogs and 14,000 books. Readers with questions or comments may write to Terri in care of this publication.