If You Go Walking

If you go walking, / You might collect berries, / Or pebbles, / Or wildflowers. / I collect questions.  
 Time spent in the outdoors during Fall and Winter stirs a child’s curiosity. In If You Go Walking, a thoughtful thread of questions (How do seeds know not to grow until spring?) invites young readers to explore the world around them with wonder. In nature, questions are everywhere, and answers can be too, if you know the right places to look.   
 Author Erin Alladin invites young readers to think deeply in this lyrical nonfiction text, celebrating children’s curiosity about the world around them. Illustrator Miki Sato’s textural collage art recreates the wonder of the outdoors in paper, felt, and embroidery silk, creating masterpieces that invite readers to look again and again. 

Erin Alladin is an author and freelance editor who has always resisted choosing between her passions for ecology and literacy. During her decade working in children’s book publishing, she spent her free hours running a Toronto community permaculture garden. After moving back to her home region of Northern Ontario she co-founded the gardening podcast Plants Always Win. Erin’s nonfiction picture books, Wait Like a Seed and the celebrated Outside, You Notice, praise the natural world and kids’ innate ability to learn from it. When Erin isn’t taking long walks in nature, she  can be found growing vegetables and editing books in a little house near Parry Sound with her wife, a forest full of birds, and (still) not enough bookshelves.