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For Teachers

Ways to Use Good Night Farm in Your Classroom

Hello Teachers!

 If you’ve found my book, thank you, and I hope you decide to share it with your classroom.

Below you will find a list of ideas in four broad categories – food, science, language arts, and art. You’ll see many ideas are connected to each other creating opportunities to cover many concepts with only a few activities.

 You will also find examples of how other teachers have already used Good Night Farm in their classrooms from kindergarten through fourth grade both here in the states and abroad.

 These experiences of using Good Night Farm in the classroom were shared with me and are provided here as inspiration for you.

Thank you for all that you do to educate and support your students!

Signature Kathleen
Bee

IDEAS

Toggle down to see ideas on how you can use Good Night Farm in your teachings!

FOOD
  • Name all of the fruits and vegetables in the text, in the illustrations
  • Count fruit and vegetables shown in the illustrations
  • What other items do we eat that are not fruit and veggies (eggs, chicken, and honey)
  • Identify fruits and vegetables by name, size, shape, color
  • Likes and dislikes, new fruit and vegetables to try
  • Where have their family found these fruits and vegetables – grocery store, farm, farmer’s market, home or community garden
  • Sensory descriptions for each fruit and vegetable – feel, smell, taste-texture, sweet/salty, smooth, seeds or no seeds inside
  • Healthy food choices – eating a rainbow, # servings, serving size on plate
  • Where does it grow – on a bush, on a tree, above the ground, below the ground
  • How do they grow – in a cluster, a single piece per branch
  • Types of farms people can visit – PYO/u-pick, orchard, berry, farm market, community garden, roadside stand (which type is in this book, how can you tell)
  • Which fruits and vegetables can you eat after washing them?
  • Which fruits and vegetables need to have an outer covering removed before eating?
  • Which fruits and vegetables can be enjoyed raw? Which could you cook?
SCIENCE & SOCIAL STUDIES
  • What seasons are shown in the book
  • Plant life cycle (any fruit or vegetable in the book as an example)
  • Vocabulary for plant life cycle, spelling, writing
  • Drawing example of plant life cycle
  • How long does it take to grow from seed to ripe
  • Which items are living and non-living things
  • What fruits and vegetables grow in farms near where you live
  • What colors (varieties) of the fruit and vegetable are common, what are less common (white cauliflower vs purple cauliflower, pink watermelon vs yellow watermelon)
  • What ripens after picking, what does not
  • What kind of tools, equipment, and vehicles are shown in the book
  • What kinds of jobs might the workers have on the farm (fields, tickets, cashier, etc.)
LANGUAGE ARTS
  • Where does the story take place?
  • Sight word and word wall words
  • Sounds, syllables, and spelling for each fruit and vegetable
  • Repeated words
  • Rhyming words
  • Categorization – fruits, vegetables, animals, nouns, living/non-living things
  • Vocabulary-apiary, pawpaw, hue, brambles
  • Poetry – meter, couplets, rhyme
  • Types of writing
  • Singular and plural – adding -s, -es, and y to -ies
  • Reading aloud practice
  • Writing – first draft, editing, proofreading, final draft
  • Relation of text to illustrations and support of text
  • What text would you change, if you were the author?
  • Letter scrambles – unscramble the letters to make words from the book
  • Word search with words from the book
ART
  • Drawing fruit and vegetables
  • Drawing a meal with favorite fruits and vegetables
  • Listen to the story with eyes closed – what images come to your mind on each page – draw that
  • What drawing would you change, if you were the illustrator?
  • Make a collage of fruits and vegetables from the book.
  • Make a collage of fruits and vegetables you HAVE eaten, you WILL try, you LIKE/favorites, you DISLIKE
    Use pictures cut from magazines, construction paper, dabbers, pompoms, iPad app (if have)
  • Draw shapes with pencil and then watercolor/crayon/marker
  • Print shapes/outlines of fruits and vegetables – sort by color, size, seeds/pits/none, fruit or vegetable, practice cutting
  • Match pictures to words
  • Painting with cut fruit/veggies
  • Make fruit or vegetable shapes with clay or playdough
  • Paper plate craft ideas
  • Put fruit/veg on a paper and use it as part of larger drawing

PLEASE SHARE!

I’d love to hear how you used my book, Good Night Farm, in your classroom.
Photos would be fantastic! You can send me a direct email here:
kathleen at kathleenvallejos dot com or use the contact form on my site here.

TEACHER USE CASES

KINDERGARTEN

Hillary A., Evergreen Public School, Vancouver, WA
TOPICS EXPLORED:
• Plant life cycle
• Fruit and vegetable identification
• Letter sounds
• Healthy food choices
• Art – drawing fruits and vegetables (favorites and new to try)
• Vocabulary – brambles, apiary, hue, pawpaw

 I used the book, Good Night Farm, to support our plant life cycle science unit and the rhyming we were working on in Language Arts. Students also did an activity matching letters to the first sound of some of the fruits and vegetables from the book. I also incorporated health standards by discussing the different types of fruits and vegetables, what students had tried, and one that they might try in the future.

Students were very engaged with the book and loved calling out the rhyming words. They asked questions about the pictures and some of the words they did not know.

One additional concept I might include after reading the book is counting the fruits and vegetables in some of the pictures. It is a good way to practice basic counting.

I am excited to use this book again next year to teach the same concepts.  The beautiful illustrations, rhythm, and rhyme of the words make it really engaging and fun for students.

Used in November 2021

FIRST GRADE

Tabatha S., Horizon Elementary School, Columbus, OH

TOPICS EXPLORED:
• Imagery
• Cumulative text

Used in 2020-2021

THIRD GRADE

Timber M., Panyaden International School, Chiang Mai, Thailand

TOPICS EXPLORED:
• Poetry
• Rhyme scheme

When I first read Good Night Farm, we were studying poetry in our classroom. The whole book is a poem and I thought that my students would like to see an example of poetry in storybook form. I invited the author to read the book to our class virtually.

The students were able to pick up the rhyming pattern. When we were reading the book aloud, the author would pause at the next word that was supposed to rhyme. The students had to guess a word that would rhyme with the last word on the previous line.

The book goes really well with our poetry unit and I’d use it again to teach the same concepts.

Kathleen stayed in the virtual meeting so the students could share poems they had written and answer questions about herself. She shared some ideas for her next book and asked the students to vote on which type of rooster they liked. We’d like to invite her back to read her next book when it is published.

Used in Feb 2022

FOURTH GRADE

Kylee F., Horizon Elementary School, Columbus, OH

TOPICS EXPLORED:
• Poetry

Poetry Unit

  • Determine a theme of a story, drama, or poem from details in the text.
  • Explain major differences between poems, drama, and prose, and refer to the structural elements of poems (e.g., verse, rhythm, meter) and drama (e.g., casts of characters, settings, descriptions, dialogue, stage directions) when writing or speaking about a text.
  • Make connections between the text of a story or drama and a visual or oral presentation of the text, identifying where each version reflects specific descriptions and directions in the text.

Used in March 2022