My class just read the book, “The Ugly Vegetables” by Grace Lin. In her charming story about celebrating differences, a Chinese-American girl wishes for a garden of bright flowers instead of one full of bumpy, ugly, vegetables. The neighbors’ gardens look so much prettier and so much more inviting to the young gardener than the garden of “black-purple-green vines”. The mom and daughter come together though to plant, label the veggies in Chinese and ultimately make vegetable soup come harvest.
This is one of Grace’s most popular books. One of the reasons I love it is that it shares timeless themes of community and diversity. A neighborhood comes together to share flowers and ugly vegetables soup, and the young gardener learns that regardless of appearances, everything has its own beauty and purpose. It has a guide to the Chinese pronunciation of the vegetables and the recipe for ugly vegetable soup which is exactly what my class made!
Below I’ve included a free template of the worksheet I used to coincide with the soup making (K1 and K2 friendly)!
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“The Ugly Vegetables” by Grace Lin –> https://amzn.to/2MnYQQb
