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.

🌿🌻Barn in Fall: Festival Fun on the Farm by Chambrae Griffith, illustrated by Taia Morley

🌿🌻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

“The Apple Picker’s Song” – Bill Staines
“Apple Tree” – Bari Koral
“Way Up High in the Apple Tree” – The Learning Station
“Five Perfect Pumpkins” – Stephanie Leavell
“Apple Tree” -Claudia Robin Gunn
“Just in Time (Pumpkins) – Jessie Farrell & the Gumboot Kids
“Green Peas in a Pod” – Jessie Farrell & the Gumboot Kids
“Chomp Chomp Chew” – Jessie Farrell & the Gumboot Kids
“Corn on the Cob” – Jessie Farrell “Oats, Peas, Beans, & Barley Grow”
“Five Little Pumpkins” – Kiboomers
“Farmer’s Market” – Laura Doherty
“Vegetable Party” – Laura Doherty
“One Potato, Two Potato” – Susan S
“Blackberry Picking” – Jessie Farrell & the Gumboot Kids
“Beans Beans Beans” – Quilla
“Country Life” – The Watersons
“Pumpkin Patch” – Makin’ Music Rockin’ Rhythms
“Harvest Hoedown” – Makin’ Music Rockin’ Rhythms

NIYN – Harvest on Spotify
NIYN – Harvest on YouTube
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.