Books
🌿🌻The Very Busy Spider by Eric Carle
This board book has textured pages that let you feel the spider’s web on the paper at each stage of construction. It also features a full barnyard of animals and the sounds they make, if you’re working on animal sounds.
🌿🌻Nature’s Architects by Amber Hendricks
This simple board book explores the different ways that beavers, squirrels, birds, and ants build their homes.
🌿🌻A Year in the Forest: Beaver by Katarzyna Pietka
This cute and interactive board book will introduce young children to beavers. Learn what they eat, how they live, and how they create new ecosystems along streams and rivers!
🌻Tool Book by Gail Gibbons
This simple board book walks children through different hand tools and the jobs things that people do with them!
🌻Construction by Sally Sutton
I love this board book for many reasons, but chief among them are the delightful onomatopoeia and the fact that the building becomes a library when completed. Excellent rhythm and rhyme make for fun and easy reading.
🌻STEM Baby: Engineering by Dana Goldberg
This photo-illustrated board book features simple text (two words a page) and portrays a range of ages in early childhood. The book describes what engineers do, from measuring to building, problem-solving, & inventing.
🌿The Perfect Plan by Leah Gilbert
A child named Maya dreams and plans the perfect treehouse. She finds just the right spot in the woods and as she starts gathering materials she realizes she may not be able to build it alone. Undiscouraged, she enlists the help of forest animals who have the skills necessary to complete her project!
🌿Rosa’s Birdfeeder Experiment by Jessica Spanyol
Rosa and friends use recycled materials to build a series of bird feeders to suit different kinds of birds. As they test out their feeders, they learn from mechanical failures and improve upon flaws in their designs. They also describe the physical qualities of different materials.
🌿The Tallest Treehouse by Elly MacKay
Two fairy friends decide to race to see who can build the tallest treehouse by sunset, but they have very different approaches to building. When a haphazard tower tumbles and gives them a scare, they team up to carefully plan and build one sturdy treehouse for the two of them!
🌿Robin Builds a Nest by Martin Jenkins
This “First Science Storybook” explores mechanics of “push and pull” as Robin builds a nest of twigs and grass and fluff, pushing and pulling each piece perfectly into place until the nest is ready for eggs.
🌿The Nest That Wren Built by Randi Sonenshine
This rhythmic book details the process of a hopeful father wren building a nest for his eggs. It loosely follows the pattern of nursery rhyme The House That Jack Built, without cumulating verses.
🌿Even an Ostrich Needs a Nest: Where Birds Begin by Irene Kelly
This book describes the many, many types of nests used by different birds, including birds who build cups, mounds, balls, or baskets, those who next on ledges, and those who dig out burrows in ground or trees. Text on each page is divided into sections so that different paragraphs can be skipped as needed, which can easily shorten a long book for a young child.
Get Busy Beaver by Carolyn Crimi
The Beaver family is hard at work building a dam and trying to compete with a neighboring family of beavers, but their son Thelonius is always daydreaming instead of helping. One morning, both beaver families are stunned to find a magnificent structure of logs and flowers constructed over the pond–built by the dreaming Thelonius, who turned out to be rather busy in his own right.
Get to Work, Trucks by Don Carter
The trucks in this collage-illustrated book are building a bridge. One of my favorite aspects of this book is actually the turtle in the road that causes the trucks to stop and who remains on the construction site throughout most of the story.
Dreaming Up: A Celebration of Building by Christy Hale
This book shows illustrations of children building things like block towers, sand castles, lego cities, and pillow forts, and then juxtapositions them next to photos of real-world architecture that resemble those styles. The texts describe the feelings, thoughts, and sensations children might experience while building. I think it’s all fabulous and I’d love to use this book again.
The Better Tree Fort by Jessica Scott Karrin
Russell and Dad move into a new house and begin planning a tree fort together. After much planning and measuring (and many trips to the store), the simple tree fort is complete. When neighbors hire builders to construct an elaborate tree fort in their own yard, Russell notices that the “better” tree fort still lacks a kitchen sink, and that there may always be a “better” tree fort out there somewhere. Russell reflects upon the special memories he made with his dad as they planned and built themselves.
The Busy Building Book by Sue Tarsky
This illustrated preschool-level book gets into more of the details of how an office building is put together!
Creative Art Opportunities
🪵Creating with clay or dough
🪵Collage with rectangles or other familiar polygons
🪵Sponge prints with rectangles, triangles, and circles
🪵Collage with craft sticks
🪵Drawing lines with craft sticks
🪵Paint with dirt or sand mixed or sprinkled
Hands-On Opportunities
⛅️Digging in dirt/gravel/sand
⛅️Stacking blocks or rocks
⛅️Construction vehicles
⛅️Playing with toy tools
⛅️Exploring real tools (for older children)
⛅️Matching real nuts and bolts (for older children; choking hazard)
⛅️Assemble new furniture or toys together (we regularly have some new play thing waiting to be assembled)
🌿Build a natural “treehouse” together for toy animals, securing with long screws
🌿Piling rocks
🌿Hammering wood
🌿Weave a circle of fallen branches into a large nest– be sure to leave a space to walk through or climb in!
🌿Visit a construction site for a local park (Minneapolis https://www.minneapolisparks.org/park-care-improvements/park-projects/current_projects/; Three Rivers Park District https://www.threeriversparks.org/construction)
Songs to Learn and Sing
“Bumpity Bumpity Goes the Dump Truck” (Tune: 10 Little Indians; Origin unclear, I’ve seen it around for a while. I always pat my lap in rhythm and start with a few realistic things a dump truck might carry and then take suggestions and try to keep a straight face.)
Bumpity bumpity goes the dump truck
Bumpity bumpity goes the dump truck
Bumpity bumpity goes the dump truck
Du-u-ump the load!
I have [dirt] in my dump truck
I have [dirt] in my dump truck
I have [dirt] in my dump truck
Du-u-ump the load!
(Faster) Bumpity bumpity goes the dump truck
Bumpity bumpity goes the dump truck
Bumpity bumpity goes the dump truck
Du-u-ump the load!
I have [sand, rocks, wood, etc] in my dump truck….
“Have you Ever Seen a Builder?” (Tune: Did you ever see a lassie; Origin of this version is unknown)
Have you ever seen a builder, a builder, a builder
Have you ever seen a builder saw this way and that?
Saw this way and that way and this way and that way
Have you ever seen a builder saw this way and that?
Have you ever seen a painter, a painter, a painter
Have you ever seen a painter brush this way and that?
Brush this way and that way and this way and that way
Have you ever seen a painter brush this way and that?
“Construction Worker Song” – Origin Unknown (Tune: “Here we go round the Mulberry Bush”)
This is the way we pound the nails
Pound the nails, pound the nails
This is the way we pound the nails
So early in the morning
This is the way we saw the wood…
This is the way we drill the holes…
This is the way we turn the screws…
This is the way we lay the bricks…
This is the way we stir the paint…
This is the way we paint the walls…
NIYN – Construction on Spotify
All playlists are works in progress and are actively curated when I have a unit in play or preparation, so new songs may appear and old songs may be removed if they don’t suit my designs.
Nature In Your Nurture 