Before Five in a Row: The Carrot Seed

With the onset of Spring, I decided to row The Carrot Seed by Ruth Krauss with my three year old. We focused on the Letter G and went with an overall garden theme throughout the week to accompany the book. It was fun teaching him how a seed grows!

With each reading, we talked about patience and perseverance.

To work on the letter G, we used a carrot and some salt for a fun sensory experience.

By far, his favorite activity continues to be using his Crayola Dry Erase Activity Center. He loves to trace his letters. I’m pretty sure we practiced the Letter G every single day at his request.

It’s amazing how quickly children go from crawling to writing, isn’t it?

We also worked on some gardening pre-writing worksheets.

Tracing shapes was a new activity this week, but also a highly loved task!

Now that Daddy quit his job, we are alternating our work schedules right now. It’s been fun to see Daddy do some homeschool preschool. And Sam? He’s in heaven!

On another day, we worked on circling what is different in each row. This is still pretty difficult for him. He doesn’t quite get the concept of rows and identifying differences in this way. I’m going to try to do more same/different activities through hands on play in the coming weeks.

I always love to watch him practice his scissor skills. The look of concentration makes me giggle.

We worked on naming our vegetables by cutting and pasting them into our basket. I tried to get him to paste them above the basket. But …

He insisted on them being put “IN THE BASKET, Mommy!” I guess this is technically correct, but it made reviewing what we had already put into the basket a little more difficult. 😉

He requested we paint one day (actually for several days and I finally had a chance to do it!), so we traced his hand and arm onto a piece of paper. Then we painted it to look like a carrot. He loved this!

He still wanted to paint, so I set him up with his easel to do some free painting.

He’s getting so boyish and much less toddler. *sigh*

Finally, we didn’t get any pictures, but we also pulled out several seeds to observe together. We used our magnifying glass to talk about all the different seeds we eat, as well as observe seeds inside various fruits.

The magnifying glass was a huge hit! He loved observing and continued to observe other objects from around the house the rest of the day!

The Carrot Seed is such a simple story, but filled with a lot of learning opportunities. Now that the flowers outside are beginning to sprout and bloom, it’s a continual reinforcement of what we learned throughout the week of rowing this sweet book!

Additional Resources & Where I Got My Printables:

• Seed & Plant Matching Cards @ Montessori Print Shop
• Garden Preschool Pack @ Homeschool Creations
• G is for Garden: Preschool Printable Pack @ Motherhood on a Dime
• Matching Fruits @ The Princess and the Tot
• Flower Learning Pack @ 3 Dinosaurs

Don’t forget to follow my FIAR Pinterest Board for more ideas!

You can see all our rowing adventures here.

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