Inside Outside by Lizi Boyd is a great picture book to show the multiple activities children can engage in both in the house and out in the yard.

The house is for making art, caring for pets, reading books, and playing games. Outside play changes as the year goes on. Outside is where snowmen are built, kites are flown, gardens are planted and tended and leaves are raked.

There are no words; instead Inside Outside reads like an “I spy” game where pages are full of images that kids can look for and name.  The brown paper stock feels warm and inviting, almost as though the book is a kid’s art project creation. Boyd’s illustrations carry that feel, as they are simple and whimsical.

Children will also delight in discovering the cutouts on each page, which provide a window from one world to another. For instance, when the child inside is making a boat to sail on the pond, he can see the pond, birds and trees out his window. On the next page he is outside sailing his boat on the pond, and he can look back through the same cutout to see into the house on the previous page, where he see the books on his bookcase.

There are so many delightful details in Inside Outside it should provide hours of fun over multiple readings as both parents and children discover new things each time they pick it up.

The publisher provided me with a copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.