(ATTENTION, TEACHERS, LIBRARIANS, AND PARENTS! The link below is to an Educator’s Guide from HarperCollins Children’s Books, to The Museum of Everything, including ideas and activities for sharing this book with your young readers:

https://documentcloud.adobe.com/link/review?uri=urn:aaid:scds:US:9ae58af4-c476-4e3c-b4e4-a0850daae5cc

When the world gets too big and too loud and too busy, it can feel good to look at little pieces of it, one at a time.

Sometimes, just looking is enough. We see how something works. We think about how it came to be.

Or maybe we imagine being so small that a rock in a puddle could be an island for us:

Or that we could fly right up to that gray cloud and turn it over to the other side. The fluffy sunlit side. As if it was a page in a book.

And sometimes ideas spring up that don’t want to stay inside our heads. We feel them get brave. They want to be a poem, or a picture, or something that doesn’t even fit into a category:

What if there was a skirt that looked like a bush in springtime?

Can a shadow be made of blossoms that fell from their tree overnight?

What if there was an island in a pond on an island in a pond on an island in a pond on an island in a pond? What would that look like?

The Museum of Everything is about ideas like that.

Everyone has them. (Yes, you do!)

Wander through. Wonder about this and that.

Let your own ideas get brave.

Here is a little video about some of the process-y parts of making this book:

(thanks to Richard Doyle, who filmed me spinning the wearer of the spirea bush skirt!)

And here is a craft you can do, to make your own Sky Museum!