On a gold-blooming day Finding fall treasures

"On a gold-blooming, bee-zooming, sun-dazzling day . . . Snakes glide. Spiders hide. Crickets chirp. Butterflies slurp. Fluff lifts. Seed drifts." Silverman's lyrical ode to autumn, following On a Snow-Melting Day (2020), emphasizes the sights and sounds found in nature: honking geese, ripe apples, drilling woodpeckers, chill breezes, and more. The rhyming text reads smoothly and makes use of invented language (including a "leaf-lunching" moose). Stunning, crisp-edged full-color photographs depict goldenrod, green snakes, white milkweed fluff, tan fawns, red sumac, and a mottled frog atop a red-and-yellow maple leaf. Photos are aptly chosen, and all (except the apple-picking shot) exclude humans. Back matter offers additional facts about each of the objects or creatures depicted (golden crab spiders employ camouflage, for example, enabling them to go undetected by predators); a glossary and further-reading list are also included. This makes a good read-aloud choice for preschool and early primary classes noting seasonal touchstones. Pair with April Pulley Sayre's Full of Fall (2017).

Colorful photographs and short, rhyming phrases extol the glories of autumn in the Northeastern and Midwestern sections of the United States. "On a gold-blooming, // bee-zooming, / sun-dazzling day…." Each of those phrases is in a bold white font against a different vibrant photograph of, for instance, goldenrod, a bee on a purple coneflower, and an autumn landscape bright with red and orange maple leaves. These are followed by more eye-catching photographs accompanied by pairs of rhyming, two-word, noun-verb combinations ("Crickets chirp. / Butterflies slurp"). The clever poetry pattern repeats several times, with the final page--still in two words--summing up the many parts. Excellent backmatter elaborates--in sequential order--on the various phrases, adding rudimentary scientific explanations of, for example, fall animal behaviors, photosynthesis, thunderstorms, and why breezes chill a human being's skin. The book offers older students the opportunity to learn about word usage and try their hand at writing poetry that uses the text's format. People appear in two photographs--in the first, a dark-haired, light-skinned family of four revels in apple-picking; in the second, which includes the poem's penultimate line, a brown-skinned child hugs a dog in the midst of a pile of fallen leaves. (This book was reviewed digitally.) Sun-dazzling! (bibliography, glossary) (Informational picture book. 3-8) Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.