Today’s picture book is another one of my new Fall favorites. AND there’s a giveaway!

Mirka Hokkanen has visited my blog several times before.  She is a good friend of mine, as well as the author-illustrator of today’s book and the illustrator of several books for children. She is a Finnish-American author-illustrator who loves to work with animal characters. She loves to add a hint of humor when ever possible and create illustrations with various media from traditional watercolor to digital to linocuts. Her head is always bubbling with ideas that she scribbles down on scraps of paper around the house. Mirka has worked on several books, most recently on Kitty and Cat concept picture books, Mossy and Tweed early reader graphic novels, and the Little Seasons nonfiction book series. You can learn more about her at her website or follow her on Twitter, BlueSky, and Instagram.

AUTUMN LEAVES is the second book in the “Little Seasons” series. You may remember Mirka and I discussing her first book in this series, SPRING SEEDS, on my blog before. This second book is every bit as clever, funny, educational, and fun as the first one, with games and experiments kiddos can also do in the back matter. It’s definitely one I want to add to my classroom collection and definitely one to study.

Welcome back Mirka!

Me: I love how much information you’ve managed to put into this deceptively simple book about leaves, as well as your sense of humor. I was giggling the entire time I was reading it. What gave you the idea for this book?

Mirka: We were doing a series on seasons and cycles in nature, so it felt like a natural choice to pick leaves for fall after we had seeds for spring. 

Me: As a classroom teacher, I’m already planning to add this book to my shelf when we study the seasons. I’m astounded by the amount of specific leaves you include. It’s not just about tree leaves here, but all kinds of leaves (fruit, vegetables, cacti, etc.). Was it your idea to include all of those?  Or did your editor suggest some of those?

Mirka: Yes. Plants usually aren’t thought of as something exciting to learn about, and when we think of leaves, we usually just think of tree or maybe flower leaves. I wanted to surprise kids and open their eyes to all the cool variations that leaves can take and what we can use them for. 

Me: I laughed so hard to see your illustration explaining photosynthesis. I’ve never seen anyone explain it this way (though yes there is gas involved). Where in the world did you get the idea of tooting and an outhouse for that process?

Mirka: I was playing around with ideas on how to talk about photosynthesis from a point of view that would be relatable to kids, and it seemed like a natural (and funny) way to explain it to my 5 year old. Kind of like us, things go in, and they change and then other stuff comes out. It made for a fun spread for the book to lighten the mood while making the facts more memorable. 

Me: It really did! Can you talk about the research you did for this book? How much research did you need to do for so many specific kinds of leaves and the incredible variety of facts that you’ve included all throughout?

Mirka: I did a ton of research for this book! Every fact and drawing needed to be correct, and I spent a lot of time searching for interesting facts about leaves and then narrowing down the best things to make a book that offered something new in the nonfiction market. I saved hundreds of images of leaves, plants, trees etc, on my computer to reference, borrowed every book that I could find from the library, and visited dozens of websites to find info and make sure that the facts and illustrations that I had were correct. The research was definitely what took me the longest to complete the book.

Me: This is the second book in the series (with the first book released last year in spring). Each of these books has been a pure delight. Will there be more books in this series (please say yes)? 

Mirka: I have the ideas ready for the next two books to complete the series for each season, but we are still waiting for the publisher to decide for books three and four. I’ve got my fingers crossed that this book does well and there would be two more. I love the series and working on them. 

Me: I’m crossing my fingers for you too! I adore the “experiments for sprouting scientists” at the back of the book. They’re such great educational add-ons. I would love to do them in the classroom with the kids. Were those your idea or someone else’s suggestion? 

Mirka: I feel like back matter is important to the series so both books have fun activities in the back. Autumn Leaves is a bit longer of a book than Spring Seeds, so we had less pages to use for back matter, so we had to cut some of the ideas I originally had for activities out. I’ll still add them as free activities on my blog and website for teachers to download, so you won’t miss out on those. 

Me: Oh how wonderful! What is one thing that surprised you in writing and/or illustrating this story?

Mirka: I wasn’t expecting leaves to be such an interesting subject to learn about for me! I’ve always been interested in nature, and know a lot about plants already. But researching why leaves are important to us; our survival, medicine, food, clothing, furniture, dyes, etc was so fascinating, and I could have spent months running down those rabbit trails. It was really hard to narrow interesting facts down! Hopefully this book can be a bit of a similar jumping off point for some kids. If they see an interesting fact, they can then ask to learn more about it.

I love that. Thanks for stopping by my blog today Mirka.

But wait, dear readers! There’s more! While this book doesn’t publish until September 2nd, Mirka has kindly offered to giveaway one copy to a lucky winner. Yay! Rafflecopter has decided to retire, so I’m going to try a new platform today. You can enter the giveaway at the SweepWidget here. I hope that works! If you have any difficulties, please let me know!