Elementary teachers looking for lesson plans and activities for The Curious Garden will find this post helpful. It includes resource recommendations, free teaching ideas, and information about the book. You’ll have everything you need to deliver engaging interactive read aloud lessons based on this story.
With a theme of best effort, this The Curious Garden picture book by Peter Brown is a favorite in 1st, 2nd and 3rd grade classrooms. It will be a big hit in your classroom too! Learn more about this book below!
Engage Your Students with The Curious Garden Lesson Plans & Activities in 3 Easy Steps:
- Read a summary of The Curious Garden. You can find it in the section below.
- Check out the teaching ideas for reading comprehension strategies, grammar topics and social emotional learning skills that can be taught using this children’s book.
- Download the book companion to make lesson planning simple with The Curious Garden reading comprehension questions, writing prompts, teaching ideas & no-prep extension activities.
THE CURIOUS GARDEN SUMMARY
Liam lives in a city that is dark and dreary. He is the only one who ever seems to go outside. Liam enjoys exploring his city and decides one day to explore the old railway. When he reaches the top of the railway, he finds a small little garden. Liam realizes the garden needs help so he starts taking care of it. As Liam’s gardening skills grow, so does the garden.
Soon, the garden is spreading throughout the city. It ends up in unexpected places like outside people’s homes and on stop signs. The community starts to notice the garden, and people even start coming outside. New gardeners appear and plant their own gardens and enjoy the outdoors.
As time passes, the city changes and becomes more colorful. But the original garden will always be Liam’s favorite.
THE CURIOUS GARDEN LESSON PLAN IDEAS
Each of our 400+ Starts With a Story book companions come with a teacher’s guide to make lesson planning quick and easy, printable worksheets and digital resources that cover ALL of the standards-based reading comprehension skills.
When it comes to writing lesson plans and finding activities for The Curious Garden, we’ve already done all of the heavy lifting for you.
We found this book was especially good at teaching the topics listed below.
READING COMPREHENSION QUESTIONS
The text-based The Curious Garden reading comprehension questions focus on:
- making predictions
- visualizing
- comparing and contrasting
- analyzing setting
- analyzing illustrations
- author’s purpose
LITERATURE-BASED SOCIAL EMOTIONAL LEARNING LESSONS
We found this story to be a great SEL picture book to promote:
- best effort
GRAMMAR, VOCABULARY & WORD STUDY
- plural nouns
- compound words
- adverbs
THE CURIOUS GARDEN ACTIVITIES
You’ll receive all of the following resources aligned to the story:
- comprehension questions
- 30 writing prompts with themed paper
- vocabulary activities
- word study print & go activities
- ideas for grammar lessons with focus sentence printables
- social emotional learning discussion topics
- graphic organizers to target specific comprehension skills and strategies
YOU HAVE 2 OPTIONS! WHERE WOULD YOU LIKE TO PURCHASE THIS BOOK COMPANION?
BOOK INFO FOR ELEMENTARY TEACHERS
What are the reading levels for The Curious Garden?
- Lexile® Measure: AD840L
- Guided Reading Level: S
- DRA Level: 44
- Accelerated Reader Level (ARC): 5.2 – 5.5
Who is the author? Who is the illustrator?
The book was written and illustrated by Peter Brown.
What genre is The Curious Garden?
It is a fiction book. You may want to check out our genre activities or read our blog post, How to Teach Genre to Elementary Students.
How many pages are in the book?
The story is 40 pages long.
