The Vegetables We Eat

The Vegetables We Eat 

by Gail Gibbons

Grades: P-3

Have you ever needed to find a way to make vegetables interesting? Well this book by Gail Gibbons is the way to do it. This book goes into detail about different kind of vegetables, how they are grown, to how they are sold in stores.

Vegetables may seem pretty boring to some children but when they read this book they will see howe many kids of vegetables there are and that you even eat different parts of vegetables. In this colorful story vegetable become more than you would think they are. They will then learn that there are many different classifications of vegetables, eight to be exact, to learning what parts of each plant we eat and why. Gibbons also shows how we make the vegetables, with seeds, water, rooting, weeding, farming, and harvesting. She draws each of these steps happening in the book so the students  can understand what they look like. After harvesting comes processing. Gibbons shows how the vegetable go to plants to be cleaned, inspected, and boxed. Then they are sent all around to world to stores and markets to be sold. Sometimes they are sold fresh, frozen, and even canned. The students get to see the process of growing the vegetables all the way up to selling the vegetables after they have already learned all the information on the vegetables themselves.

A teacher would use this book while teaching students about different kinds of plants. Although there is not a main character in this book so there is not much character interaction there are pictures of people working of a farm, cleaning vegetables, and selling vegetables. The text itself including the tidbits on the rest of the pages were very informational and easy to understand. I liked how they but definitions of the words in the text on the pages so the reader would not be confused.

The pictures in this book are very bright and they easily grab the attention of the reader. I feel as though they make the reader want to know about the vegetable and become excited about a topic that may not always be exciting. The pictures also give more information other than the text. There are little bits of information on the pages here and there to give some more details about the vegetables. The pictures even have labels on them, for example when there is a picture of people working on the farm they have labels for the rake, hoses, and trowel. 

This book could also promote the actual eating of vegetables. Since many children do not like to eat vegetables (myself included and a child) this colorful book could make them more interested. It could also help them to be more fun so they can actually know what they are eating.

MA ELA Framework connections are: 3 (oral presentation), 4 (vocabulary and concept development), and 9 (making connections).