Nature In Your Nurture

Books

🌿🌻Apples & Pumpkins by Anne Rockwell
An illustrated fiction story, a child visits a farm with an apple orchard and a pumpkin patch. Short with simple text.

🌿🌻Growing Vegetable Soup by Lois Ehlert
This simple book follows a garden from planting to harvest– and then to soup! Name all the vegetables and tools or stick to the simple text for an easy read for young children.

🌿🌻How Do Apples Grow? by Jill MacDonald
This is an illustrated non-fiction board book detailing the growth of apples from seed to tree to fruit. It also diagrams the different parts of an apple in cross section, discusses different types of apples, and where the apples are sent to after they are picked.

🌿🌻Mrs. Peanuckle’s Vegetable Alphabet by Mrs. Peanuckle (illustrated by Jessie Ford)
This board book describes edible plants from A to Z, including Dandelions and Fiddleheads. It also includes concepts essential to gardening, such as Queen bees and Underground.

🌿🌻Little Pumpkin by Suzanne Fossey (illustrated by Gisela Bohórquez)

🌻Tap the Magic Tree by Christie Matheson
An interactive board book, the audience is instructed to tap the page, shake the book, and blow on the pages to make different things happen to the apple tree as it grows through the year.

🌿Amara’s Farm by JaNay Brown-Wood
Amara needs a pumpkin for an autumn potluck. She explores a wide variety of fruits and vegetables that share some characteristics of the pumpkins she’s looking for. Our main character and her family are PoC, as well. The author lives in California, where many more of the plants featured can grow readily.

🌿Secrets of the Apple Tree by Christie Matheson
I thought to exclude this shine-a-light book from my list because it doesn’t really talk about harvesting of apples at all, but it does talk about an apple tree as habitat for animals and that’s worth reading at least once if you have access to this book from the library.

🌿From Apple Trees to Cider Please by Felicia Sazari Chernesky
A little girl visits an apple orchard and helps her family collect apples. They then go into a building with an apple cider press and feed their apples into it, crushing them up and pressing cider from the apple mush. With their cider ready to take home, they explore other orchard treats such as apple cider doughnuts!

🌿Apple Harvest by Jenna Lee Gleisner
A photo-illustrated nonfiction book about collecting apples in an apple orchard.

🌿A Trip to the Pumpkin Patch by Jenna Lee Gleisner
A photo-illustrated nonfiction book about picking pumpkins in a pumpkin patch.

🌿From Pumpkin to Pie by Lisa Owings
A photo-illustrated nonfiction book following the life of a pumpkin from seed to harvest to pie.

🌿The Story of Corn by Robin Nelson
Nonfiction book with photo illustrations depicting the cycle of corn farming from seed to table.

Toto’s Apple by Mathieu Lavoie
One of my all-time favorite books for toddlers, this book focuses on an apple in a tree as the object of worm Toto’s desire and the inspiration for many creative schemes designed to get him up, down, or over to the apple. You should be aware before you start reading that he does get swallowed in the end when a little girl eats the apple– but he’s just happy to be together with his apple. It’s weird but its also fabulous and toddlers love it!

Apples for Little Fox by Ekaterina Trukhan
The only thing Little Fox loves more than apples is a good mystery. When all the apples in town go missing one day, he gets to use his detective tools to sleuth out the fate of the apples. In the end, he walks into a surprise birthday party and finds his friends stole all of the apples to create an apple pie–and a mystery for him!

Pick a Pumpkin by Patricia Toht
This beautifully-illustrated Jack-o-lantern book has a funky sort of rhythm and rhyme but it works, describing the process of carving pumpkins, from patch to porch.

Soup Day by Melissa Iwai
A child goes to the store with her mother and picks out produce needed to make their favorite soup (celery, onion, potatoes, carrots, mushrooms, zucchini, and parsley). At home they wash and cut the veggies and put them into a pot of water to cook, adding seasoning spices. While they wait for the soup to be ready, she reads books and plays with her mother. Snow falling in the first page indicates that this book might take place in the winter, though without accumulation in Minnesota it would likely be mid-fall or mid-spring.

Creative Art Opportunities

🌽Star prints with apple halves
🌽Painting on apple slices with food coloring watercolors
🌽Painting on a pumpkin
🌽Printing with stamps cut into apples or potatoes
🌽Paint with cinnamon sticks
🌽Roll apples in paint
🌽Draw with red and green dot marker
🌽Collage with hay

Hands On Experiences

⛅️Explore with aluminum pie tins
⛅️Making soup (real or play)
⛅️Baskets of produce toys
⛅️Touch and carry pumpkins/squash/apples
⛅️Explore with hay in a sensory bin
⛅️Explore with cracked feed corn in a sensory bin
🌿Wash a pumpkin (dirt, paint, etc)
🌿Check for ripe foods in a garden or fruit tree
🌿Roll pumpkins down a hill/across the grass
🌿Collect apples rolled across the grass (golden delicious are small, round, inexpensive, and will only bruise a little)

Songs to Learn and Sing

“Way Up High in the Apple Tree” (Tune: Twinkle Twinkle)

Way up high in the apple tree
Five red apples smiled down at me
I shook that tree as hard as I could
Down came an apple
Mmm, it was good
Way up high in the apple tree
Four red apples smiled down at me

[Etc., counting down]

“Five Little Pumpkins” (finger play)

Five little pumpkins sitting on a gate
The first one said, “Oh my, it’s getting late!”
The second one said, “There’s a chill in the air!”
The third one said, “But we don’t care!”
The fourth one said, “Let’s run and run and run!”
The fifth one said, “I’m ready for some fun!”
Then, “Ooooo,” went the wind
And out [clap] went the light
And the five little pumpkins
Rolllllllllled out of sight

“Five Perfect Pumpkins” by Stephanie Leavell

Five perfect pumpkins in a pumpkin patch
One went rolling and soon went splat
Oh no! What do youth think about that?
Only four perfect pumpkins in a pumpkin patch

Four perfect pumpkins in a pumpkin patch… [etc.]

“The Apple Picker’s Song” (“The Apple Picker’s Reel”) – as sung by Bill Staines in 1993, though written differently by Larry Hanks in 1966

Refrain:
Hey, ho, it makes you feel so fine
Looking out across the orchard in the bright sunshine
Hey, ho, it makes you feel so free
Standing in the top of an apple tree

Up in the morning, before the sun
Well, I won’t be finished ’til the day is done
My pick sack’s heavy and my shoulder’s sore
but I’ll be back tomorrow to pick some more

[Refrain]

Now, you start from the bottom and you pick ’em from the ground
And you pick that tree clear all the way around
Then you put up your ladder and you climb up high
Staring through the leaves at the clear blue sky

[Refrain]

There’s a three-legged ladder, wobbly and well
Climb up to the top—Oops!—I almost fell
Got a twenty-pound sack hanging from my neck
And there’s three more apples that I can’t quite get

[Refrain]

Hey, ho, it makes you feel so down
Picking up windfalls, crawling on the ground
Hey, ho, it makes you feel so free
Standing in the top of an apple tree

Hey, ho, you lose your mind
If you sing this song about a hundred times
Hey, ho, it makes you feel so free
Standing in the top of an apple tree

[Refrain]

“Apple Tree” – Bari Koral

I was a little seed
In the ground, waiting
I had a dream that I could be
One day an apple tree
La la lalala La la la lalala

One day, the rain came down
It made a mighty sound
And when the sun came out
I grew bigger in the ground
La la lalala La la la lalala

And all I need
Is a little more rain
And a little more sun
And some hope and love and time
So I can grow

I was a little seed
In the ground, waiting
I had a dream that I could be
One day an apple tree
La la lalala La la la lalala

And all I need
Is a little more rain
And a little more sun
And some hope and love and time
So I can grow
And grow

Now, look at me
I’m the biggest apple tree
If you want to climb up me
You can pick an apple from my leaves
La la lalala
Pick an apple from my leaves…

“Oats, Peas, Beans and Barley Grow” A folk song of which there are many versions

Oats, peas, beans, and barley grow.
Oats, peas, beans, and barley grow.
Do you or I or anyone know
How oats, peas, beans, and barley grow?

First the farmer plants the seeds
Stands up tall and takes his ease
Stamps his feet and claps his hands
And turns around to view his lands
[Chorus]

Next the farmer waters the seeds
Stands up tall and takes his ease
Stamps his feet and claps his hands
And turns around to view his lands
[Chorus]

Then the farmer hoes the weeds
Stands up tall and takes his ease
Stamps his feet and claps his hands
And turns around to view his lands
[Chorus]

Last the farmer harvests the seeds
Stands up tall and takes his ease
Stamps his feet and claps his hands
And turns around to view his lands
[Chorus]

“Country Life” – Folk song

Refrain:
I like to rise when the sun she rises
Early in the morning
And I like to hear them small birds singing
Merrily upon their laylums
And hurrah for the life of a country boy
And to ramble in the new mowed hay

In spring we sow at the harvest mow
And that is how the seasons round they go
But of all the times choose I may
I’d be rambling through the new mowed hay

For [Refrain]

In winter when the sky is gray
We hedge and we ditch our times away
But in summer when the sun shines gay
We’d go ramblin’ through the new mowed hay

For [Refrain]

“Vegetable Party” by Laura Doherty

All my friends they grow in the garden
All my friends in my backyard
Let’s all have a vegetable party
Bloom and sprout and grow (Bloom and sprout and grow)

I ask the tomatoes (Tomatoes)
How do you grow? How do you grow?
Round and red Rround and red)
Don’t you know? Don’t you know?
That’s how we grow

I ask the golden corn (Golden corn)
How do you grow? How do you grow?
In a husk (In a husk)
Don’t you know? Don’t you know?
That’s how we grow

All my friends they grow in the garden
All my friends in my backyard
Let’s all have a vegetable party
Bloom and sprout and grow (Bloom and sprout and grow)

I ask the little green peas (Little green peas)
How do you grow? How do you grow?
In a pea pod (In a pea pod)
Don’t you know? Don’t you know?
That’s how we grow

I ask the carrots (Carrots)
How do you grow? How do you grow?
Down in the ground (Down in the ground)
Don’t you know? Don’t you know?
That’s how we grow

All my friends they grow in the garden
All my friends in my backyard
Let’s all have a vegetable party
Bloom and sprout and grow (Bloom and sprout and grow)

I ask the broccoli (Broccoli)
How do you grow? How do you grow?
Like little green trees (Little green trees)
Don’t you know? Don’t you know?
That’s how we grow

I ask the lettuce (Lettuce)
How do you grow? How do you grow?
In a patch (In a patch)
Don’t you know? Don’t you know?
That’s how we grow

All my friends they grow in the garden
All my friends in my backyard
Let’s all have a vegetable party
Bloom and sprout and grow (Bloom and sprout and grow)

NIYN – Harvest on Spotify
All playlists are works in progress and are actively curated when I have a unit in play or preparation, so new songs may appear and old songs may be removed if they don’t suit my designs.