Apart, Together: A Book about Transformation

Apart, Together is a deceptively clever book. Here, readers see how two or more separate objects can combine to form something completely new and different. So, blue and yellow paint becomes green paint, while seeds, soil, sun, and water combine to create beans, and bees and flowers combine to make honey. And these transformations are literally everywhere. Flour, eggs, and sugar in a kitchen become a yummy cake, while bricks and blocks can become a space ship blasting off into space in a child’s imagination. Even players kicking balls separately can come together to make a team that can score!

Linda Booth Sweeney, a complexity educator and award-winning writer, has created a delightfully entertaining book that subtly introduces educational concepts such as cause and effect, prediction, systems thinking, and emergence to young readers. Ariel Rutland’s simple but beautifully colorful illustrations bring these transformations to life. And with the seeds of this book planted in young minds, that combination may have those minds discovering transformations in the world around them. Who knows what discoveries await them?