MommaReads

This is the perfect book if you have your own home garden or if you are a teacher and you have a garden at your school. The teacher in this story tell the students about how Thomas Jefferson and his friends had a contest each year to see who could fill a bowl full of peas first using the peas grown from their own gardens. Thomas Jefferson learned that there were a lot of different types of peas and some grew bigger and faster than others.

The students in this story end up having the same contest amongst themselves in their classroom. They learn about different pea varieties, the effect weather can have on growing and good sportsmanship. Eventually someone does win the crown for the first bowlful of peas.

Maybe you are tired of the cold and snow? Maybe you are already thinking about the garden you are going to plant this spring? Maybe you love a good cumulative tale? This book has it all. Isabella’s Garden is a cumulative tale (in the style of This is the House that Jack Built). Cumulative tales are great for pre-readers…there is so much repetition that it is easy for them to join in and “read” too.

We recently got back from a vacation where we kayaked down a very quiet and peaceful river early in the morning. We saw a skunk on the shore and we also saw several duck families along the way. This book reminded me of that peaceful morning…the cool water, the vegetation in the water with fish slipping in and out of the weeds. This book is almost like a lullaby…calm and peaceful.

You can imagine that T. Rex probably isn’t the most graceful Easter Bunny, but when his friend Peter Cottontail gets a cold at Easter, he does what any good friend would do and steps in to help. Luckily T.Rex has some other dinosaur friends who help him find some more eggs (when he breaks the first set) and help him dye them for the children in town who are going to be looking for their eggs when they wake up in the morning. Unfortunately, T. Rex and his friends oversleep on Easter morning…you’ll have to read the rest to find out how they make things right.

This is a great book about a boy and his grandfather in the garden and a red hen that keeps following them. This story has a lot of repetition which children love and is great for developing beginning reading skills. It also is a rhyming books which is also great for beginning reading skills. Children will like the ending when they finally find out why that hen was following them. She has a surprise for them…

Love, love, love this book! It’s colorful, it involves counting and numbers, it rhymes…there is so much in this book for so many ages. I love that this book isn’t “just” a counting book and it isn’t “just” a book that rhymes. It’s also a science book that very young children all the way through early elementary school children could use to learn more about caterpillars, what the caterpillars eat, what animals eat caterpillars and different types of butterflies.

A little girl imagines what her garden would be like if she had her own garden. She would have jelly bean bushes, she would be able to change the colors of the flowers just by thinking about it, there would be no weeds and all the rabbits in the garden would be chocolate rabbits.

This is a cute rhyming book about the seasons a garden goes through starting with planting in the spring, things growing and getting picked in the summer, harvesting pumpkins in the fall and the blanket of snow covering the garden in the winter.

This is SUCH a great book…so much vocabulary and pictures to discuss. It is a non-fiction text with a short sentence or two on each page with great pictures that accompany the pics. Some of the great words that you might want to discuss with your child include: annual, perennial, bulb and tuber. We have had a family garden almost every year for the past five or six years, so this would be a great book for us to read to help us to learn even more. Don’t have a garden? This book might make you want to have one. 🙂

Sarah and Grandpa work together to plant and care for their garden. One day, later in the summer, Grandma invites Sarah over for lunch made out of their garden.