Drawing Outdoors: A Perfect Time of Year

 The creative pair behind a recent book are new to me, but I now have my eye out for anything else they have created and will continue to produce. Author Jairo Buitrago is an award winner and is based in Mexico City. Rafael Yockteng has been illustrating acclaimed/awarded picture books, too, and currently live sin Bogata, Columbia. I appreciate the publisher, GREYSTONE KIDS,(An Aldana Libros Book) for this deft and artful translation to English. Both the story and art reflect a  seemingly non-USA setting, but the characters, circumstances, imaginations, and inspirations are so global, so universal that every child will be able to enter the experiences fully.

GREYSTONE KIDS, 2022

So, let's get to it. This new book, DRAWING OUTDOORS, has already been widely praised. I welcome this opportunity to add my voice to those accolades. Just as the art incorporates depth, crisp lines, lush colors, and familiar details (like a dog lifting its leg on a bush), the text presents the story directly and deliciously.

"Our school has almost nothing. A blackboard, some chairs. It has a teacher. She's always there. She stands in the doorway and waits for us every morning."

Not every reader will attend school in a small, hilltop building with red tile roof, arriving on converging dirt trails, alongside a river, tucked between green mountains. (Some WILL, and they will thrill to seeing their own familiar but rarely-portrayed school setting in a picture book.) Many, regardless of urban or other experiences, will identify with those opening lines above. 

And children everywhere will be tagging along with that teacher says lessons will be OUTSIDE today, snatching up their paper, crayons, and explorers' spirits to join the fun. What might have been a delightful example of children doing open-air nature art, or science observations (as in this prior post), or even a mapping exercise, turns out to be an expansive lesson in imagination. (The more mundane possibilities had been my prediction, so I really appreciated the imaginative developments that followed.)

In fact, with continued roaming, pausing, and specific prompts, these very diverse students spend time   seeking, finding, then sketching or painting a series of dinosaurs along the river bank, weaving through boulders, roaring in a wooded area, or flying through the darkening skies. Eventually they take a snack break while resting on "a branch as big as an ankylosaurus". Even during the snack scene we see that this "group" is composed of charmingly diverse individuals, friend and sibling pairs, and personality patterns that disrupt any sense that we readers would DARE to bring stereotypes or assumptions to our perceptions of communities outside our own narrow perspectives.

And yet, just as author John Schu took a more conventional approach to "school" in his recent book (reviewed HERE), regardless of the building or location or number of staff, WHAT IS A SCHOOL? can be answered as it can be here: SCHOOL is a place to look, listen, learn. To find safety, care, and inspiration.

And it should  always a place to find ourselves connected to others from every background.

With an expanding effort to "ban" books beyond narrow parameters, books that reveal what a wide and glorious world exists outside ourselves, even such a simple book as this might find itself questioned because of its definition of "school" or "learning" or even community. If you have opted to ignore this issue or feel it is one too many straws on your overburdened life, please consider reading this article. I'll appreciate it if you do.