Book Review: Off to the Nursery

One of the best things about the return of warmer weather is getting to plant new flowers and starting the vegetable garden if you have one. Off to the Nursery by Alice Oehr is subtitled “a celebration of gardening, plants and seasons,” and it’s also a celebration of diversity (because gardening is for everyone) and caring for the earth.

The book starts with the work of getting the garden ready for spring, pulling out the old plants and spreading compost made from kitchen scraps. They grab tomatoes and peppers, learn about zucchini and eggplant and explore the tasty world of herbs.

They also look through the seeds, succulents, berries and fruit trees, flowers and aquatic plants, talking about the benefits of different plants and how fun they are to grow. Maybe you can relate to the family buying what seems like way too many plants?

The book was originally published in Australia, so some of the flowers mentioned might not be familiar to your or your kids, but that’s kind of fun, too. You can also use this as an opportunity to talk about which plants in the book can grow where you live and that just like animals, plants have preferred habitats, too.

Illustrations are colorful and the book combines a standard font and a hand written font to make it feel more like a journal about the garden. The illustrations include fun facts and growing tips such as always planting mint in a pot or germinating seeds on a wet paper towel before planting.

If you want to introduce kids to gardening or just talk about what kind of plants can be grown at home where you live (yes to tomatoes, probably no to the kumquat tree), this cute book is a great addition to your spring reading list.

About the book: 30 pages, hardcover. Published 2025 by Scribble US. Suggested retail price $18.95.

Did you know that October is Squirrel Awareness Month? I didn’t know we needed more awareness of these little creatures, but let’s take it as a sign to learn more about squirrels!

Let’s start with some fun facts via Kids Konnect: did you know there are five subfamilies and more that 280 species of squirrels? The smallest are pygmy squirrels and the largest, the Bhutan giant flying squirrel, can be longer that 4 feet (1.2 meters).

Tree squirrels can climb down trees so fast because their ankles can rotate 180 degrees, allowing them to grab the tree bark as they go down. While most squirrels don’t survive their first year of life, they can live five to 10 years in the wild and squirrels have been known to live up to 20 years in captivity!

Rhythms of Play has more fun facts and tips for observing squirrels if you want to add some real life nature to your nature study.

We always like to start these collections with life cycle and parts of the animal printables, so let’s grab the squirrel life cycle an parts of a squirrel worksheets from Montessori Nature. (It doesn’t look like these are free any more but they have a whole unit study on squirrels you can buy that includes life cycle and parts activities, characteristics of different kinds of squirrels, a printable poster, information about predators and more.)

Grab the squirrel lapbook printable (free with email address) from Homeschool Share to learn the parts of a squirrel, where they live, what they eat, whether they hibernate and more. There’s also a nut taste test printable, a place for making observations about squirrels, life cycle of an oak tree, games and more.

Simple Everyday Mom has some cute squirrel themed worksheets including tracing the letter s, labeling the parts of a squirrel and a letter s maze. She also has more activity pages with a squirrel theme, including matching, a more traditional maze and a counting and graphing activity.

Work on letter recognition with this squirrel and acorn game printable from Teaching Mama. I love the idea of hiding the letters in a fall themed sensory bin for kids to find, identify and match to the letter on the worksheet.

For older kids you can do this “if I were a squirrel” writing prompt from Lesson Planet.

And throw in a little counting with these squirrel and acorn tens frame printables from JDaniel4’s Mom, which you can use to count real acorns or any other little fall themed thing you have handy.

Have you read?

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