His Favorite Food is Pickles!

Say what?? In second grade guidance classes, we're discussing differences in appearance. "We all look different, but we're all good kids!" is the teaching focus, and we talk about the importance of two things: making the best of our own looks, smiling, and accepting ourselves, but we also discuss the importance of respecting other people, no matter what they look like. I've been letting the children vote on story books to read because I have so many good ones on this topic. Several classes have wanted to hear Little Sweet Potato, and as you would predict, the story characters are plants. The little sweet potato gets plowed out of its field by a tractor and ends up lost and lonely. As it courageously wanders on its way in search of home, it meets lots of fruits, vegetables, and flowers that are thriving in their own garden patches. Trying to find a place where it can belong, it asks over and over to join other neighborhoods, only to be rejected because of its bumpy lumpy looks. The plants are described by appearance rather than labeled, so the children have fun guessing what type of plant is being read about. Examples are flowers with velvety purple and yellow faces, fruits that look like shiny green marbles, sweet-smelling red flowers with soft petals and thorny branches, big shiny purple vegetables with satiny skin, and leafy bunches of green with thin orange spikes peeking out of the ground. Most have been easy for the students to figure out, although eggplants have only been known by a few. In one class, when we came to a page describing long green and white striped veggies with yellow flowers, I heard an eager voice call out, "Pickles!" Well since the plants in question were cucumbers, the cow-licked boy was definitely on the right track, and I had to give him points for knowing where pickles originate!