The Carrot Seed

I love to be amidst nature and Spring time is the best time in India to enjoy the outdoors because summers are too hot and winters are too cold. So I consider the few weeks that we get of this season a blessing. Its also a great time to take learning outdoors! You can have conversations about plants, bees, butterflies, different kinds of flowers and much more with little children. Planting different seeds and reading books about them are few of our favorite activities during this time.

And the one book we make sure to read is "The Carrot Seed" By Ruth Krauss.

It's an adorable book about a little boy who plants a carrot seed and waits for it to grow. He tends to his seed everyday even though others around him believe that it would never grow.

The book has simple words and illustrations and will appeal to little children. Through this book, they will also learn what does a seed need in order to grow.

I always ask children to sequence the story once we read it in order to find out weather they  comprehended the story or not and also to build their language skills. For this story, we made a carrot craft and then used pictures for sequencing.

I got the pictures from HERE.

We also used a real carrot to stamp different sizes of carrots.

We talked about how a carrot seed grows. Get this printable from HERE.

  

Since we were focusing on letters and reading words we played this fun game. Children had to match letter/word with  the picture.

Have you read this book? What activities do you use with this book? Leave a comment to let me know.

Read more about other PLANT BOOKS that we read during this time.

And follow my PLANT BOARD on Pinterest for more ideas.

Books to read during the spring season!

Spring is finally here and its a joy to awake to the sounds of chirping birds, Flowers are in full bloom and I can even spot few butterflies in my garden. The weather is perfect and one can spend a reasonable amount of time outside without feeling too hot or cold. So to welcome the season, our spring books have come out and we are engaging in a lot of Spring/Easter alphabet and number games.

But in this post I will talk about some of my favorite read alouds during spring season.

This is undoubtedly my favorite book. It tells the story of a girl who imagines and plants her own garden. This book is great to get the creative juices flowing.After reading it, you can let children  draw and write about their own beautiful gardens.

Grab this FREEBIE for the activity!

This book has simple words and illustrations. Its about a boy who plants a carrot seed and believes that it will grow.

You can use this Eric Carle book to talk about seasons, germination of seeds and how seeds get transported. You can follow up with a fun plant craft after reading this book.

Once I made these gigantic flowers with my kids.

Use this book to talk about colors and different kinds of flowers. Give children seeds of different flowers to plant their own rainbow gardens.

This book is a story about a father and a son growing their own vegetables and then using them  to make soup. After reading the book, you can ask children what veggies they would like to grow and put in their soup.

So visit your local library and start reading!

And since this a great time to introduce the topic of plants, you can check out my Plant Unit for some fun ideas. Do come back for some Spring/Easter ideas that I will be sharing soon.