Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Flower and Planting Books

Sunflower House by Eve Bunting
 
In this book, a child plants twelve sunflower seeds in a circle to form a sunflower house for the summer.  Bear and I planted our own sunflower house this Spring and are hoping the seeds sprout soon.

Jody's Beans by Malachy Doyle is a sweet book about a little girl who plants bean seeds with her grandfather.  We liked this book because instead of "Jody" and "Grandpa" I substituted Bear's name and "Tito" (grandpa in Spanish) each time we read the story. 

In Max's Magic Seeds by Jean Pierre Corderoch, a boy is given a bag full of seeds for his birthday and asked to scatter them around the town on his way to school to beautify his community.  I love how the teacher in the book took the flowers and incorporated them into the school day.  It reminded me of how I once taught my students - incorporating pieces of them into my lessons. (I digress, but we once did a whole writing assignment on My Littlest Pet Shop animals because all the girls in the class were fanatical about them. LOL)


Miss Rumphius by Barbara Cooney is a book I loved as a child.  The previous book reminded me of Miss Rumphius, so I found it at the library for Bear.  A child decides she wants to make a difference in the world and as she grows up in the story, she realizes all these goals she made as a child, except for the one about making a difference, until she starts scattering flower seeds wherever she goes.

Zinnia's Flower Garden by Monica Wellington has really bright illustrations.  I liked how it taught different flower names.  I was inspired by this to make all the flower three part cards.

Jasper's Beanstalk by Nick Butterworth and Mick Inkpen has the cutest cat and we just adore the page in which said cat is mowing his bean plant!  Love how the book also teaches the days of the week.  "On Monday, Jasper planted a bean." (Or something like that....)  "On Tuesday he watered it..." 

I'm linking this to What My Child Is Reading, Read Aloud Thursday, and Feed Me Books Friday

13 comments:

  1. All those books sound great. I hope that Anna encounters teachers like you in her school journey - teachers that will work with students' strengths. We'll see :)

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  2. Great books! We've been planning to plant sunflowers too! Love to see your sunflower house once they grow! Make sure to measure them against Bear for a math activity! :)

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  3. Great books. My eldest seems to be into flowers (she is 3.5) and am looking for a book which teaches the flower names so may try n find zinnia's flower garden!

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  4. Seems to be everyone has the same idea. We are getting ready to plant our vegetable garden so we went to the library to get some books on seeds etc. Just when we arrived there was a lady checking out about 10 books. Pretty much all of the childrens books on seeds, plants and growing vegetables!!! So we'll have to wait another three weeks.
    Luckily we're learning about bees at the moment and they had lots of books in on them : )

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  5. In response to the blending question. I'm not sure how other children learn but I know that when we played phonemic games of breaking down each sound, JC would blend them together. The problem we've encountered is that she will sound out each and every letter for most words. Recently has learned some basic rules like ee, oo, and some sight words. I'm planning to introduce blends and digraphs to help her along. In the beginning, we started with word families but I noticed she tended to memorize the endings and not read each letter. So I would just play lots of games where she guesses the word and you sound out each letter. And we don't do it in any formal way...just while we are driving or walking. Hope that helps!

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  6. I hope you posts pictures of your sunflower house as it grows!

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  7. These look like wonderful books. Miss Rumphius looks like a beautiful story. We are also big fans of Nick Butterworth. I love the idea of teaching flower names in Zinnia's Flower Garden. My kids have just started asking about flowers as the daffodils have started blooming here. Thanks for sharing these.

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  8. Great picks this week! We've read the first two and Miss Rumphius (of course!), but I don't think I've seen the others.

    Thanks for linking up to Read Aloud Thursday!

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  9. How fun! I love the gardening theme of your books. We've planted our garden and the kids love to help. Thanks for sharing!

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  10. Miss Rumphius is one of my favorites, too, but I didn't discover it until I was in a children's lit class in college! All the other books are new to me, and I'm going to add them to our library list!

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  11. What great books--we are waiting on some sunflower seeds to grow as well. :) Thanks so much for linking up!

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  12. All these books look great. I will have to add them to my list to look for.

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  13. Mrs Rumphius just went back to the library here. We loved it so much it was hard to let it go.

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