The Giving Tree (Story, Art, Learning)

The Giving Tree

By Shel Silverstein

I love this book. We have been reading this book fairly often over the past one year. It’s a simple and heartwarming story about a tree’s unconditional love for a boy when he was little till he turned old.

 

This week, I decided to use this book as a starting point for art and some learning time for Sophie. I drew up a tree on a large piece of paper and labelled it with the different parts of the tree. Placed a palette with green and yellow paint and a couple of brushes. When Sophie was up from her nap and saw it, she went straight to it and started painting away.

We talked about the different parts of the tree such as the roots, trunk, branches, leaves, flowers, fruits and animals that live in trees. We also looked at the papaya tree that we had planted together. I have one that we planted months ago and another a couple of weeks ago. We planted these trees from seeds. In this way, Sophie was able to see the stages of a plant. Papaya seeds are really easy to grow in Asia. I repurposed an old milk carton to germinate the seeds. We watered it everyday and within 2-3 weeks, we saw the sprouts peeking out of the soil. It was a beautiful sight. In another month or two, when the plant is slight bigger, we will plant it into the garden. And with the repurposed milk carton, all we need is to cut up the carton and put the soil and plant into the ground. In this way, we avoid hurting the roots of the plant.

In the next week, I plan to dig deeper into this subject. We will make a trip to the botanic gardens to do tree bark rubbings, leaf printing, create a little catalog of the trees that we have seen.