Book Review: Sparrow’s Easter Garden

March 5, 2026 by Sarah White Leave a Comment

For religious people, Easter isn’t just about the one day of celebration, it’s a whole season that can include Lent, the 40 days before Easter that are a time of reflection and sacrifice.

Sparrow’s Easter Garden by Roger Hutchison and illustrated by Ag Jatkowska focuses on the season of Lent and the preparation for new life that is happening in a religious sense and in the world more generally.

It opens with Sparrow visiting the garden to find that it’s messy and overgrown since the last time he visited. Friends Mousie, Buck and Turtle use their gifts to help clean up, plant seed and new plants and move other plants around to reset the garden for spring.

Despite a storm on Good Friday testing the animal’s faith that their work will pay off, Easter brings a bright, beautiful morning to a garden full of color, reminding the animals that “new life blooms in the morning light.”

I can’t help but find it unrealistic that a garden can be full of flowers at Easter, given as it usually falls in pretty early spring in the Northern Hemisphere, but you can understand where he’s going with the allegory here.

It’s clearly a religious book without using the word Jesus, though it does mention Holy Week, Good Friday, Holy Saturday and Easter (and includes the animals singing hallelujahs). the book could be a gentle way to talk to kids about the Easter story and help relate it to their own lives, because we all have times when we despair but with hard work and hope, the new day will be better.

And of course on the surface level it’s also a cute book about friends working together to complete a difficult task and their work paying off in the end, which is always a valuable message for kids.

About the book: 32 pages, hardcover. Published 2026 by Beaming Books. Suggested retail price $17.99.

Right click and save this image to download and Print.

Have you read?

Make Unpoppable Bubbles You Can Play with Inside

If it’s hot where you live, you might be looking for some fun activities you can do with kids inside the house. And while bubbles are generally a strictly outside the house kid of activity, these special bubbles are ones you can play with inside. It’s both a lot of fun and a science lesson.

These bubbles aren’t blown into the air, you blow them onto a tabletop gently through a straw.

What’s really cool about them is that they will stay on the table top without popping. You can even blow another bubble inside the first bubble, or stack bubbles on top of each other.

Why does this work? It’s thanks to a special ingredient in the bubble solution: sugar.

This particular recipe is from Play Party Game, but I’m sure you can find it other places with similar ingredients as well. But this post has a good explanation for what is normally happening with regular bubble solution made mostly with just soap and water, as well as why the sugar helps to make bubbles stronger and helps them last longer.

You could make this into a full on science experiment for your kids, comparing regular bubbles (this time you’ll want to do it outside or somewhere easy to clean) to the “unbreakable” bubbles, letting them hypothesize about what ingredients might help make bubbles stronger or what the sugar does to the solution.

You can talk about the molecular structure of the bubble being altered by the sugar, which makes it stronger and longer lasting.

They even have an activity kit you can buy to help guide your explorations and that offers extension activities for you to try.

Or you could just play with them. No judgement here; it’s summertime.

Grab the recipe and more of the science behind the bubbles from Play Party Game. And while you’re playing with bubbles you can also check out my giant bubble solution recipe over at Our Daily Craft.

[Photo: Play Party Game]

Have you read?

Leave a Reply