April Virtual Book Club – The Carrot Seed

WOHO it’s back – the virtual book club with Toddler Approved. This months book is The Carrot Seed. I had it as one of our garden books last week and J and I have had great fun reading through the book as well as watching it being read to us on youtube (isn’t it refreshing to have someone else do the reading to a toddler and you get to listen to it).

So onto our activity. J is 32 months old and I needed something that was fun and that he would connect with. Every time we read the book he would point to the little plant label and ask what is that (we don’t have fancy plant markers for our seedlings so it was something new to him), so taking inspiration from him and the fact that it is an extremely wet we decided that our activity would be to make some plant signs.

What you need to make our plant labels

Card
Pens
Laminate and pouches or contact paper
Craft Sticks

How you make our plant labels

I drew out some vegetables that I knew we were growing in our garden for J. These are very simple drawings but luckily he recognised them. I also added the words as I am trying to get him to relate letters to being words and words to pictures as well (no I don’t expect him to read at 32 months but it’s a great way to start with sharing the written word when ever possible).

We had great fun colouring in the vegetable – he was so proud to be able to recognise the vegetables and also that we were going to be growing them together in our garden. I think he was most excited about growing Pumpkin’s or as he likes to call them Pumpkits as he remembers Halloween and our pumpkin that we craved and wants me to make more.

Once he had coloured in them all I got him to help me with the laminating (an interesting experience and our first time and probably will have a little break before I do it again with him as was very challenging!).

We then threaded it through the laminate and cut it up to just around each label (I had pre cut them as have found out that they seal better and won’t let in the rain that way if you cut them up before hand, add the to the laminate pouch and then cut around them afterwards).

I attached a craft stick to the back with some PVA glue and sticky tape (hedging our bets) and we are just waiting for the rain to stop to add them to our garden.