How Does Your Garden Grow?-Monthly Challenge

By Janie Reinart

Mary, Mary, quite contrary

How does your garden grow?

With silver bells and cockleshells

And pretty maids all in a row.

                                                                     ~Mother Goose

How does your garden grow? Have you ever tried growing other things besides vegetables and flowers? Maybe balloons?

By Jerdine Nolen

What if you planted other things besides seeds? What would happen if you planted jelly beans? If you haven't guessed by now, your challenge is to write a story about planting a garden.

Or perhaps you can grow happy. Or sad. 

By Jon Lasser

Using positive psychology and choice theory, this book shows children that they have the tools to nurture their own happiness and live resiliently.

"My name is Kiko.

I'm a gardener.

I grow happy.

Let me show you how."

By Kate Messner

Up in the garden, the world is full of green. But down in the dirt exists a busy world—earthworms dig, snakes hunt, skunks burrow—populated by all the animals that make a garden their home.

"Up in the garden I stand and plan--my hands full of seeds and my head full of dreams."

Maybe you can plant a rainbow.

By Lois Ehlert

Lois Ehlert's bold collage illustrations include six pages of staggered width, presenting all the flowers of each color of the rainbow.

"Every year mom and I plant a rainbow. In the fall we buy some bulbs and plant them in the ground."

By Kathryn O. Galbraith

Go a little wild! This book explores the many ways seeds are distributed.

"The farmer and her boy plant their garden... In the wild meadow garden, many seeds are planted too, but not by farmers hands. Oooooo--whishhh! The wind scatters seeds. It spills them and spins them. And sweeps them up, up into sunlight and out across the field."

Share your favorite garden books with us in the comments. What will you be planting in your story garden?