Picture Book Thursday: Harvest Time

Corn
Written and illustrated by Gail Gibbons
Holiday House
Age Range 6-10 years

Golden Delicious: A Cinderella Apple Story
Written by Anna Egan Smucker
Illustrated by Kathleen Kemly
Albert Whitman & Company
Age Range 4-9 years

The Best Gift of All
Written by Jonathan Emmett
Illustrated by Vanessa Cabban
Candlewick Press
Age Range 4-9 years

Hi folks.  It’s official.  The cold weather is here and the scraping of frost off of windshields could be heard throughout New England.  I’m using today’s picks to help me hang onto images of sunny fall days.

Corn
I grew up in Western Massachusetts, eating some of the best sweet corn in the US of A but I had no idea how much there was to know about corn.  Luckily, that’s where Gail Gibbons' expertise comes in.  Here’s the skinny.  Corn is classified into four different types, sweet corn, popcorn, flint corn and dent corn.  Antarctica is the only continent on which corn is not grown.  And finally, “tassels contain millions of grains of pollen.”  You have to go check out this book to learn more.  Your students will love it.  Oh, and my favorite? Silver Queen.

Golden Delicious: A Cinderella Apple Story
If you’ve ever read Michael Pollan’s The Botany of Desire and thought the apple information would be useful in the classroom but too advanced for your students, then this is the book you’ve been waiting for.  It traces the discovery and distribution of the Golden Delicious.  The author’s note is extensive and intriguing enough to make me want to plant some apple trees in my yard.

The Best Gift of All
Start off a book with “Hot-diggety drat!” and you have me hooked.  In this fourth title featuring Mole, Rabbit is sick and in need of some cheering up.  With some digging help from Mole, and gifts from Squirrel and Hedgehog, the gang is reunited. Students are sure to enjoy this story of friendship.  And don’t forget to have them compare the action in the end papers.

Activity
Purchase a selection of apples to have a taste testing and graph the results.  Invite a neighboring class or two and compare their graph results.  Bon appetit!

And with that folks, go have an apple or some popcorn and I’ll see you at the Round-Up tomorrow.