Growing Vegetable Soup by Lois Ehlert

Genre: Fiction


Publishing information: Houghton Mifflin Company, 38 pages

Summary: Growing Vegetable Soup has interesting pictures that are labeled and kid friendly. In the story a child and his dad are growing a garden so that they can have vegetable soup. The story follows them through the process from beginning to end. Big gloved hands pland the seeds, water the plants, and pull weeds. They bring the vegetables home to cut and wash for the vegetable soup.

Reading level: 2.0

Interest level: K-2

Integration: This book would be great to use with a unit about healthy food. The teacher could read this book and discuss how vegetables grow. After discussing how vegetables grow the teacher could draw and label a picture of vegetables. The students could discuss the food pyramid and all the different types of food on it. The teacher could bring in a bunch of pictures of food and organize them into the different types of food. The students could also use vegetables to make stamps on paper and then decorate them. The large culminating activity could be to have your students plant some vegetable plants and watch them grow. They could use math to measure how tall the plants grow and graph how they grow.

Potential problems: I do not foresee any problems with this book.