Growing Vegetable Soup: Elementary Lesson Plan
<em>Growing Vegetable Soup</em> by Lois Ehlert is a delightful story for young children that explains the process of growing vegetable soup from seed to soup. The book is colorful and contains pictures and words for many different gardening-related objects. Your students will love this picture book that is the springboard for the following activities.
Story Sequence Cards
After you read the story, why not share a story sequencing activity with your students. One easy way to sequence the story is to simply run off copies of 4 or 5 pages of the book. Be sure to include pictures from the beginning, middle, and end of the story that depict the logical sequence of the planting process. Show a picture of planting the seeds, watering, harvesting, and making the soup. During circle time, have the children work together to sequence the pictures into the proper order. Use the storybook to check the sequence with the children.
Vegetable Soup Art Project
The pictures in the story are fairly abstract, with brightly colored vegetables plentiful on the pages. Make a vegetable soup art project that depicts your students’ own brightly colored veggies. Provide construction paper and glue, and ask your students to cut out some vegetables for their soup. The students will glue the veggies onto paper that has a large soup pot printed on it. Have the students color the pot, and then glue their vegetable cut-outs in the pot. Make ABC soup by providing real alphabet pastas and having students glue them in the pot as well.
Veggie or Not Game
Another fun activity to go along with Growing Vegetable Soup is the veggie or not game. Teach students to identify vegetables by playing this game at circle time. Simply prepare large cards with printed pictures of various vegetables, meats, fruits, and dairy foods. Hold up the food cards one at a time. Ask the question, “Veggie or not?” The children will answer, Veggie! if it is a vegetable, or Not! if it is another type of food. You can use these same cards as a file folder game. Place the cards in a file folder, and put a green dot on the back of each card that displays a vegetable. The child will go through each card, and stack the vegetable cards in one pile, and place the other cards in another pile. The student will turn over each card from the veggie pile to find the green dots to check his work.
