The Searcher and Old Tree

awesome! absolutely love it! best purchase i have made. price was great for my budget. already recommended to my family and friends.

We checked this book out at our local library for our four year old. He absolutely loved having this book read to him before bed. Sweet little story

Raccoon knows just where to go for his safe and secure sleeping spot. The old Tree knows just how to keep raccoon safe even when a nasty storm blows into the area.A mustread book to soothe children about storms and the safety of their homes.Written and illustrated by David McPhail, published by Charlesbridge.#PB #home #safety #security #storms #comfort

I have been reading this book to my daughter since she was 3 and she is now 5. She loves looking at the pictures and pondering how this tree protects the raccoon. The story is nicely written and the pictures are beautiful. It's one of those books that a parent really enjoys reading to their child. It's a classic in my mind.

Will this tired raccoon be able to get a good night’s sleep after spending all day foraging for food?Not every picture book needs to include a lot of words in order to get its point across. It was interesting to see how much meaning Mr. McPhail packed into the limited number of words he did use. Every single one of them served an important purpose for the storyline, and that made his writing work really well when read out loud.As much as I adored the illustrations, the plot itself was thin. I was hoping to see much more time spent exploring the relationship between the Old Tree and the raccoon who was called The Searcher. It would have been nice to know how they met, why the tree decided to start protecting the raccoon to begin with, or what the tree got out of their arrangement. Had these questions been answered even partially, I would have chosen a much higher rating for this story.With that being said, the narrator did come up with some creative, real-world examples of things that the Old Tree protected The Searcher from. I didn’t know exactly what to expect when I first began reading, so it was fun to see if my predictions of the kinds of threats a raccoon would face outdoors overnight would be correct. The closer I got to the ending, the more curious I became to see what would happen next.The Searcher and Old Tree would be a great choice for very young readers who have limited attention spans.originally posted at long and short reviews

McPhail, David. The Searcher and Old Tree. Charlesbridge. 2008.This lovely book opens with a picture of a raccoon lying asleep in a tree. On the title page, as the moon arises, raccoon stretches and climbs carefully down the tree trunk. A series of vignettes shows raccoon tiptoeing toward a garbage can, diving in, and surfacing with an opened can of food; these opening pages are without words. The first sentences read, "After a long night's search for food, the Searcher heads home. It has been a fruitful trip, and his belly is full. Dawn is near--and so is home." Carefully, the raccoon climbs back up his tree and goes to sleep. The tree stands tall alone at the edge of a bluff, overlooking the sea. The wind picks up and waves crash against the shore. All day, the storm pummels the tree as raccoon sleeps soundly. "The wind tries to pull Old Tree out by the roots. It can't." Evening comes, and the peacefully sleeping raccoon repeats his wake-up routine of stretching. This is a very sweet story that invites preschool children to contemplate their own night of peaceful sleep reassured that they will rest safely.