This lovely, informative book encourages you and your class to get out onto the land to explore the schoolyard, your community and the lands on which you live and learn.

Presented through an Indigenous lens, The Land Knows Me is written as a walk through nature where readers are gently guided to learn about plants from a traditional perspective. There are plants for eating, plants for healing and plants for building. All of them have significance and are respected and honoured.

I value that the book has informative sidebars and includes essential safety and proper harvesting practices. Discussions could open up around sustainability and ensuring you are giving back as a sign of gratitude and respecting the land and plants by only taking 10 per cent of the plant, not the first or last plant, or sometimes not harvesting at all.

I love using this as a read-aloud for a K-3 audience. The illustrations are colourful, vivid and full of detail that allow students to acquire plant knowledge. We often bring this book along during outdoor learning and have gone on our own plant medicine walks and had the students draw and label the parts of different plants. We have used the cedar in our schoolyard to make both cedar tea and cedar jelly. We also found raspberries, dandelions, red clover and maple and talk about how these plants can be used for food and medicine.

There are more than 40 Squamish words to learn in this book. Educators can encourage students to look up the translations for the plants that they find in their school area as an extension activity using the helpful glossary, making the reader feel like they’ve learned something and had fun doing it.

This book presents a wonderful opportunity to have children start thinking about their relationship with the land they live on and the plants that are around them. Reading this book reminds us about the importance of slowing down and appreciating nature, seasonal changes and the life that is all around us.

Teri Flemming is a member of the Renfrew County Teacher Local.