Oh my, we have a new favorite story.

We started out by reading a book called, “Secret in the Garden” by James Mayhew. It’s about a girl named Sophie who falls asleep and dreams about finding a secret garden and meeting Mary (Lenox) in the garden.  Great pictures, they reminded me of Mary Cassat’s art.

Then we started reading the Young Readers Version of the story. It started out with Mary on a train in England. It skipped all the beginning part of Mary’s life in India and why she’s going to live with her uncle in England. It was definitely abridged, there a few parts left out.

We did watch a few versions of the story via Netflix. Cartoon and real people. They were all different. The BBC version was a bit long, but we endured. It was fun to compare them all.

Between reading the books and watching the movies, I gave Avery different sizes of paper to create different kinds of flower gardens. The first day I gave her water colors. Other mediums were;

* markers and dot markers

* random greeting cards and cutouts from magazines (collage)

* crayons & stickers

* scrapbook stuff

She cut flowers and animals out of a few magazines to decorate the garden too. She did it all on her own. She used tape to make the flowers stick on the paper. I am glad she “took the bull by the horns.”

While reading the book together Avery chose to buy a different version of the story at Barnes & Noble with her birthday money. It came with a necklace with a key on it. She noticed that the key had a robyn (a bird) on the key hole. Love this girl.