Title: Growing Vegetable Soup
Author: Lois Ehlert
Description: This beautifully illustrated book brings the sequence of growing and enjoying one’s own vegetables to life.
Goals:
- Vegetable Vocabulary
- Vegetable Growth Cycle
- Narrative/Story Retell
- Sequencing
- Pretend Play
Why I like this book: This book offers the “just right” amount of information to use as a primer for a planting unit, and the illustrations are beautiful.
Ideas for this book:
- Generate sequence cards by copying the key pages of this book and have kids put them into sequence.
- After reviewing the vegetables introduced in this book and their salient features, play the Bag Game using the set of vegetable pictures.
- Reinforce the concepts by actually planting some seeds in small cups or gardens and watching them grow over several weeks.
- Incorporate some pretend by using Playdoh for the “planting”. This also addresses some fine motor goals:
- Flatten a small ball of Playdoh to make the “dirt”
- Roll tiny balls of Playdoh between thumb and first two fingers to make “seeds”
- Press the seeds into the dirt
- Roll Playdoh between two palms to make “stalks” and “stems”; plant in the dirt
- Roll more tiny balls for “vegetables” and place on the stalks and stems
- Replace the Playdoh vegetables with plastic fruit (the Velcro kind are ideal), pretend to chop and place in a soup pot
- Serve and enjoy
- Good book for reinforcing multisyllabic word production (vegetable, tomato, cucumber, broccoli, etc) and velar production (corn, cucumber, broccoli, carrot, cut, cook, etc)
- Lois Ehlert has a wonderful collection of books, use this book as part of an author study
- The illustrations in this book are very simple, have kids make their own collage art. Have precut shapes available or have the kids trace and cut their own for more fine motor fun.
Submitted by: Karen S Head M.S. CCC-SLP
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