The Curious Garden activities and lesson plan ideas

Our The Curious Garden Activities are now digital for distance learning with editable teaching slides and worksheets based on Peter Brown's book. Read aloud the picture book then use the printables or go paperless with Google or Seesaw to practice standards-based skills.

THIS READING UNIT FOCUSES ON USING THE MENTOR TEXT TO TEACH:

◼️ READING STRATEGIES

☐ making predictions

☐ visualizing

☐ comparing and contrasting

☐ analyzing setting

☐ analyzing illustrations

☐ author's purpose

◼️ SOCIAL EMOTIONAL LEARNING TOPICS

☐ best-effort

◼️ GRAMMAR & LANGUAGE CONCEPTS

☐ plural nouns

☐ compound words

☐ adverbs

SUMMARY OF THE MENTOR TEXT:

Liam lives in a city that is dark and dreary. He is the only one who ever seems to go outside. Liam enjoys exploring his city and decides one day to explore the old railway. When he reaches the top of the railway, he finds a small little garden. Liam realizes the garden needs help so he starts taking care of it. As Liam’s gardening skills grow, so does the garden.

Soon, the garden is spreading throughout the city. It ends up in unexpected places like outside people’s homes and on stop signs. The community starts to notice the garden, and people even start coming outside. New gardeners appear and plant their own gardens and enjoy the outdoors.

As time passes, the city changes and becomes more colorful. But the original garden will always be Liam’s favorite.

THIS COLLECTION OF ACTIVITIES and LESSON IDEAS INCLUDES:

➜ Comprehension Questions categorized by reading strategy; text-dependent
➜ Social-Emotional Learning guidance lesson ideas & discussion topics based on the story
➜ Vocabulary Activities with kid-friendly definitions
➜ Grammar Topics selected to align with the text
➜ Focus Sentences use the book & author's craft as a mentor text to improve writing
➜ Lesson Planner summary, background info and planning space

➜ Story Mapping Printable identify character, setting, problem and solution

➜ Making Words Activity Page use any word from the book

➜ Focus Sentence copy work, identifying elements of the sentence, rewriting)

➜ Design a New Book Cover demonstrate understanding of the text by creating an illustration

➜ Predicting Activity primary-ruled and wider-ruled versions
➜ Summarizing Somebody → Wanted → But → Then → Finally

➜ Comparing and Contrasting using a Venn Diagram

➜ Cause and Effect analyze how events affect one another

➜ Visualization illustrate visualizations from the story and support thinking with text-based evidence

➜ Making Connections identify text-to-self, text-to-text, and text-to-world connections

➜ Thematic Writing Paper Use with the Writing Prompts... Makes a Great Bulletin Board

➜ 2 Sequencing Activities First → Next → Then → Last and Beginning → Middle → End

➜ 2 Vocabulary Activities Vocabulary Booklet and Word Mapping

➜ 2 Character Trait Activities listing traits and supporting traits with text-based evidence
➜ 30 Text-Based Writing Prompts 3 prompts for each of the following types of writing:

• narrative
• persuasive / opinion
• descriptive
• expository / informative
• creative / story writing
• procedure / how-to
• list-making
• letter / postcard writing
• poem
• book reviews

INCLUDED DIGITAL ACTIVITIES:

➜ 5 Teaching Slides to use for instruction (add questions, vocabulary, instructions, etc)

➜ 15 Student Pages for use in Google™️ Classroom or as editable files to create customized printables