Vegetables

We took a break from homeschooling for Christmas, as I'm sure many of you also did. I decided to start back up again with school today as it seemed like we all needed more of a structured routine again after being away from it for awhile.

We began our unit on vegetables about a week before Christmas, and didn't finish it until today. In our lessons, we talked about how "God gives me all that I need". Just as he created the plants, and gives rain and sunlight so they can grow, we discussed specifically how he provides all that we need in life as well.

"He makes grass grow for the cattle, and plants for man to cultivate - bringing forth food from the earth." Psalm 104:14

There were a number of suggested activities in our curriculum that we didn't do. For example, it isn't the ideal time of year for planting a garden around here, and I just couldn't convince myself to buy a bunch of vegetables, only to cut them up and use as paint stamps. (Groceries are expensive these days!) We did go to the grocery store a few times and we looked at the variety of vegetables in the aisle. But mainly, we read a bunch of books about vegetables and kept our lessons simple. Like I said, we started the unit just before Christmas, and at that time, my creative juices were lacking due to the brain power being used to accomplish everything else on my Christmas To-Do List.

Here is what we did accomplish though...

Our carrot badge

The two nonfiction books we read were "Vegetables" by Nicola Edwards and "The Vegetables We Eat" by Gail Gibbons. I especially liked the latter of those. The book described and gave examples of the eight groups of vegetables, how they are planted, how they get to the stores, and how to plant and tend your own vegetable garden. It had great illustrations as well. I'd highly recommend it!

We read "The Tale of Peter Rabbit" by Beatrix Potter. As I read the story, the kids had to raise their hand each time I read the name of a vegetable. Then we made a list of all the vegetables mentioned in the story and Madison drew a picture of Mr. McGregor's garden based on our list.

We read "The Carrot Seed" by Ruth Krauss and Madison illustrated her own pictures from the story.

We read "From the Garden" by Michael Dahl, which is a counting book about growing food. A fun feature about this book is that on each page, you can search for the hidden number in the picture. It also had some fun facts about vegetables at the end of the book.
We also made our foam, lowercase "v" in the shape of a couple vegetables (a pea pod and a carrot).

We read a fun book titled "Scarlette Beane" by Karen Wallace. It's a story about a little girl named Scarlette, who possesses the power to grow huge vegetables in her garden. Scarlette decided to grow a big vegetable castle for her parents to live in, so for our snack, we had a variety of vegetables in the shape of a house.

Madison also drew her version of the vegetable castle.

In the book "Frog and Toad Together" by Arnold Lobel, we read the chapter titled "The Garden".
We also read "The Vegetable Group" by Mari C. Schuh and reviewed The Food Pyramid, with an emphasis on the vegetable group of course.

Letter V Word Search
(http://www.first-school.ws/t/word-search/alphabet/v.htm)
Letter V Tracing Page
(http://www.dltk-teach.com/t.asp?b=m&t=http://www.dltk-teach.com/alphabuddies/image/btracev.gif)

I found these vegetable pictures on www.makinglearningfun.com, and we used them to play a game of "Go Fish".