Last year, miraculously, it snowed in Houston on Christmas Eve. Most of my children had never seen real snow before this event. This year on Christmas morning we woke up four year old Z-baby.

“Z-baby, it’s Christmas! Wake Up!”
She ran to the window. It was a beautiful morning, sunny, seventy degrees outside.
“Where’s the snow?” asked Z. “It can’t be Christmas; there’s no snow.”
She hadn’t told us that she remembered the snow from last year and was expecting another Christmas miracle.

So this is the week that we experience snow vicariously through the picture books of those authors and illustrators who know what living through winter is like. Susan Jeffers is the illustrator of this book of Robert Frost’s Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening. I wish I could show you some of the pictures in this book here on the blog. It’s just beautiful. You’ll feel as if you’re riding in a sleigh through the snowy woods along with the poet and his farm horse. And when the narrator stops to play in the snow, you’ll want to join him.

I know this poem can be read on different levels, but it can just be a story of a man who stops in the woods to play for a while and “watch his woods fill up with snow” and who then realizes that he has many things to do and “miles to go” before evening. Children will enjoy the rhythm of the poem, the story and Jeffers’s illustrations. Adults will enjoy reading the picture book out loud and thinking about the poem and its meaning. Win/win . . . for winter.

This year on Mondays I’m planning to review some of the books listed in my book, Picture Book Preschool. Picture Book Preschool is a preschool/kindergarten curriculum which consists of a list of picture books to read aloud for each week of the year and a character trait, a memory verse, and activities, all tied to the theme for the week. You can purchase a downloadable version (pdf file) of Picture Book Preschool by Sherry Early at Biblioguides.