Book Review: Sparrow’s Easter Garden

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.

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Learning numbers actually involves a few different skills, from recognizing the shape of the number and knowing the word that goes with it to understanding one to one correspondence for counting and what order the numbers go in.

A lot of this is learned best through play and activities that get kids counting and tracing and otherwise interacting with numbers. These activities can help.

I specifically mentioned tracing above because of these number formation rhymes cards from Teaching Mama, which can be used in lots of ways to practice making the shapes of the numbers, including tracing, lining up items on the number shapes (and counting them!), using playdough to shape the numbers and so on. Each number has a little rhyme to help you remember how to make it, which is cute.

And speaking of playdough, you can find lots of playdough number mats with different themes for kids to use as they learn about numbers. Preschool Play and Learn, for example, has these cute apple themed ones that also teach one to one correspondence as you learn the numbers and count to 10.

Or use these tree-themed ones from Live Over Cs to form the numbers, count out items on a ten frame and place the correct number of items in the tree to match the number (do this with playdough, little buttons or whatever manipulatives you have on hand). Your little builders will also love these Duplo number mats from Life Over Cs, which allow you to shape the number out of blocks and count out the number of blocks that corresponds to each number.

I also love these mats from The Savvy Sparrow that include the number and the word you can trace with playdough or marker, showing how to count the number on your fingers, a tens frame and a number line.

Finger plays and counting songs are lots of fun for little ones, too, and Childhood 101 has a great collection of songs and rhymes having to do with numbers (as well as printable song cards you can use with them.

This cardboard roll number chain form Hands On As We Grow would be a fun addition to singing number songs or to use in other play and counting games. And we all love something easy to make with stuff we already have.

Older kids who already know the order of numbers can also use these connect the dot number printables from Fun Learning for Kids. Or use the shapes for playdough mats or to practice tracing even for kids who don’t know all the numbers in order yet.

Have you read?

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