The Carrot Seed: Day One

In May we planted our garden. Over this last week we have been watching the carrots push up through the soil and we have even taste tested some of our carrots -just to be sure that without a doubt they are ready to be harvested and guess what, they are! That's why I decided to begin "rowing" our first book with Ruth Krauss' 1942 classic, The Carrot Seed.

First we had to soften up our soil, so we watered the carrots and made a nice muddy mess to work with. 

Vada loves to help water the garden!

She was slightly hesitant of getting muddy, however.

The texture of all of the soft carrot leaves also threw Vada off but she did help pull up several of her own carrots! 

I think that overall, Kiliegh had the best time at harvesting these carrots. It was like opening a gift with each pull. You never knew just what size or shape of carrot you were going to get and Kiliegh seemed genuinely surprised with each new carrot. I loved her enthusiasm. 

I found two carrots that were intertwined together and thought of them as "lovers" (I kept that to myself though). The girls all thought that this find was by far the coolest.

We planted "baby" carrots of some sort... I cant remember the actual name but they don't grow too big, Jasmine found the biggest and called it her prize winner.

Vada became very uncomfortable with all of the dirtiness, so we washed off a carrot and showed her that they were "good" and that we could eat them. She liked that.

Before the girls came out I filled up Vada's water table with water and brought out some old tooth brushes and after we had pulled a good amount of carrots, I had the girls bring the them to the "cleaning station" to be cleaned.

Vada, Kiliegh and even my (almost) fourteen year old Jasmine enjoyed doing this. Vada caught on quickly and loved playing in the water. 

I even joined in!

We even gave Vada one more job as a way of working on listening skills and following directions. Once the carrots had been cleaned we asked Vada to put them onto the sidewalk to dry.

She followed the task each and every time!

Look! My "lovers" all cleaned up.

After all of our carrots were cleaned and dried I got out orange and green paint and a piece of paper for each of us. Using the carrots as our brushes we painted carrots of our own.

This was a fun project and it was so neat to see the individuality between all of them come out in their art. They were all given the same task and tools to work with but in the end the results were all very different and beautifully unique - just like them!

Mine

Jasmine's

Vada's

Kiliegh's

I will continue to read The Carrot Seed to Vada every day throughout this week as well as other books that may have carrots in them by doing this the book will become familiar, the story line and plot will as well but so will other things, such as colors that we talk about, projects that we work on even the taste and sound from eating an actual carrot. Most importantly we are creating memories.

Oh, I almost forgot a really important detail...I got a ton of of my ideas for this weeks activities through a fantastic homeschooling blog called Delightful Learning. Actually, I often link back to this blog for ideas and will be doing so as I continue to "row".