This one is not called Over and Under anything, which is the first clue that it does not behave quite like its four siblings.
A girl and her grandmother plan a garden, plant it, tend it and harvest it across a whole year. Up in the garden there are leaves and sprouts, vegetables coming on, fruit ripening. Down in the dirt there are earthworms digging, snakes hunting, skunks burrowing, and the entire crew that makes the top half possible. Kate Messner and Christopher Silas Neal again, $9.99, banded K to 3, and it sits on our Stealth Science shelf with the rest of them.
It is the odd one out in two ways. The title is the first. The second is that its hidden world is the only one in the series your child can reach from the back door with a trowel.
The science it actually teaches
Two real things, and the second one is the one people miss.
The first is that soil is alive. A young child's working model of dirt is that it is a brown material, like sand but worse, and that worms are in it the way raisins are in a bun. This book replaces that. The dirt is a habitat with residents, and the residents have jobs. Earthworms are machinery: they dig, they pull material down, they mix it, and the holes they leave behind are how water and air get to roots. There are hunters down there too, because a snake underground is hunting something and a skunk is digging for a reason. Once your child has that picture, a shovelful of garden dirt is a different object.
The second is the structure. This book runs a full year, and almost no picture book at this age does. It plans, it plants, it waits, it harvests. That turns a garden from a scene into a sequence, and a sequence carries a hard, useful rule: what you do in spring decides what you get in August, and August has no way to fix April. That is the most important thing a child can learn about growing food, and it arrives here without ever being stated as a lesson.
Underneath both is the connection that gives the book its shape. What comes up depends on what is going on down. The green half and the dark half are one system, and the pages are arranged so you cannot look at either one without the other.
The child it lands with
There is a child who digs. Not gardens, digs, in the strip beside the driveway, with a spoon. That child is the reader.
After that, the child who is being handed a bed of their own this spring and needs a reason to care about the part of it that is not the vegetables.
And a third one. This is a grandmother and a grandchild for the length of the whole book, which makes it the natural one for a grandparent to buy and then read on a visit. That is not a small thing and it is not true of the other four.
K to 3 holds. It reads aloud at four and goes independent around seven.
One place to stop and talk
Do not stop inside the book for this one. Stop outside.
Take a trowel and cut one square foot out of a worked bed, about four inches deep, onto a sheet of newspaper. Count everything that moves. Then go and do the same thing in the packed ground by the driveway or under the swing set, and count again.
The gap between those two numbers is the whole book, measured by your child, in your own yard, in about fifteen minutes. Put both spadefuls back where they came from when you are done.
What to know going in
Timing is the caution here, and it is the practical kind rather than the difficult kind.
This book is a calendar. Read it in February and your child will finish it wanting to plant something, and there will be nothing to plant, and you will spend six weeks answering the same question. Read it in the weeks before you actually put things in the ground and it stops being a book and becomes a work order, which is when it is worth the most money.
Then the title. What the product page shows is the publisher's keyword-stuffed version with a string of extra words attached. The book on the cover is called Up in the Garden and Down in the Dirt. You have not bought a strange edition.
Snakes and a skunk turn up as ordinary neighbors doing ordinary things, which is correct, and which the occasional child finds sharper than the adult reading it expected. Otherwise this is the gentlest book in the series. Nothing frightening happens and nobody is lost.
Where to get it
Up in the Garden and Down in the Dirt is $9.99, the same as the snow and canyon volumes.
Buy this one alongside seed packets rather than alongside books. It is the only title in the series whose hidden half a child can go and verify for the price of a trowel, and a book a child can check is worth more than a book a child can only be told.
Which means the recommendation splits, and this is the one place I would break my own rule about starting with the snow book. If your family grows anything at all, even a tub of beans on the back step, buy this one first and be surprised how far it goes. If nobody in your house is going to put a hand in dirt this year, this is the one of the five to skip.
If your child liked this one
Books we have written about that sit close to this one, by reading level and by subject.
Over and Under the Pond: Why You Cannot See In
Over and Under the Pond: (Environment and Ecology Books for Kids, Nature Books, Children's Oceanography Books, by Kate Messner
Grade K to 3
Over and Under the Rainforest: It Is Central America
Over and Under the Rainforest by Kate Messner
Grade K to 3
Yucky Worms: The Book You Can Check in the Garden
Yucky Worms: Read and Wonder by Vivian French
Grade K to 2
Animal Scales: Fur, Feathers and the Same Five Jobs
What If You Had Animal Scales!? or Other Animal Coats? by Sandra Markle
Grade K to 3
Browse every book we have written about by age, by kind of book and by subject: Find the right book for your child. Or see the whole Stealth Science shelf.
