I hope all of you moms had a great Mother’s Day this past weekend. I created this card for my mom, but it would also work for Father’s Day coming up! You can pair the card with some tomato cages, tomato plants, work gloves and this book for a perfectly-themed gift.
If you are not familiar with this book, Too Many Tomatoes, I would love to introduce it to you. It is a story about what a grandpa and grandma do, along with their grandson, when they have an abundance of tomatoes. The underlying theme of generosity and kindness is evident throughout the book.
While this story is great to read while cuddled up next to grandpa and grandma, there are many opportunities to directly or indirectly target speech and language as well!
- SO MANY speech sounds! Check out my post on speech sound production to see when sounds are typically developed by.
- /b/: buzzing, bumbly, bees, bursting, berries, beans, began, barrels, buckets, backs, behind, biscuit, butter, basket, borrow, book, boy
- /p/: popping, peas, potatoes, pails, penny, painter, parade
- /m/: many, me, man, magazing
- /n/: nickel, needs, neighbor
- /h/: handful, holler, hand, hooray
- /t/: tall, tomatoes, too, town, today, tumbling, tow, topple, towering, tomorrow, teacher, tailor, tickle
- /d/: dollar, down, designs, dancer, downtown
- /f/: find, for, fiddle
- /g/: garden, girl
- /k/: cars, curling
- l-blends: blossoms, plateful, climb, slippery, plumber
- r-blends: grandfather, crateful, grateful, drippy, ground, trains, tracks, trucks, crawling, drummer, tree
- s-blends: sprout, skies, street, sweet, sprawling, stand, sleeping
- /s/: seeds, sun, soil, sing, song, say, scientist, sailor
- Many examples of alliteration
- ‘It’s buzzing with blossoms and bumbly bees’
- ‘Tomatoes on trains. Tomatoes on tracks. Tomatoes on tow trucks with cars on their backs’
- Rhyming: see/me, hooray/today, penny/many, stand/hand, find/behind (plus many more!)
- Occupations – talk about what these different people do in their job: teacher, tailor, scientist, sailor, painter, plumber, dancer, drummer
- Make a real-life connection
- Go to a local Farmer’s Market – can your child find a stand with tomatoes?
- Plant a tomato plant in your yard – they even grow well in a container! We rarely get to bring any into our home as the children eat them like candy off the vine!
When I gave this book to my parents, I included a picture of one of their bounties from the previous summer. My plan is to add a picture to the book yearly of the multitude of tomatoes they harvest!
Here are a few different options for the card, depending on whom you are planning on giving it to. You could write your children’s names on the tomatoes, cut out a small picture of them or just leave the tomatoes blank! I then just printed the sheet with the tomatoes and glued in onto some red construction paper. Each of the kids wrote a little note on the inside. Contact me if you would like it formatted in a different way and I can do my best to add that to the below choices.
If you are interested in purchasing this book for your family or for a grandparent, you can get it over on my e-commerce site here.
If you decide to use this idea for a grandparent, I would LOVE to see what you all put together to create the theme (garden gloves? tomato recipe book? a pot to grow the tomatoes in?).
Happy Reading (and Planting!),
Language and Literacy 