Book: What Will Grow?

Blog by Katja Beebe, MT-BC

By Jennifer Ward, Illustrated by Susie Ghahremani

Music therapists often use books paired with movement, rhythm, and melody to support their student’s goals. Just in time for Arbor Day and Earth Day at the end of April, What Will Grow? by Jennifer Ward  is a fun visual tool to expand our student’s knowledge on agriculture, food, and their natural environment around them!

On each page the author describes a seed or flower bud by its color, shape, size, and more with the same repeated question “what will grow?” to build anticipation for the next page that shares the food or flower that grew. The simple rhythmic pattern of each page creates great opportunities for percussion play in an individual or group setting. I have used this for my pre-schooler’s and my younger school-aged students with body percussion, group drumming, and turn-taking play using visuals of fruits, vegetables, and plants in the book.

Pre-K Students

Within my pre-school sessions, I use this book to work on cooperative play skills such as imitation and turn taking. I pass visuals to each student and encourage turn taking while reading the book. When we sing about what grew from the seed, each student can drum/play their own beat along to the syllables of the fruit/vegetable/flower. I then copy the student’s rhythm and encourage the rest of the class to imitate them. This is a fun way to work on cooperative skills and attention to recognize when it is their turn and when it is not.

I also use this book to work on academic skills such as identifying fruits and vegetables. I use the same visuals in this way with a sorting visual for  fruits and vegetables. Students can work on placing them on the correct side throughout the book; this works great in both individual and group settings. I also touch on other academic concepts by prompting them to identify the shapes, colors, and size of each harvest with repeated “wh” questions for each plant. My students love to sing the answers with me using the same rhythm and melody that I use to sing through the book!

School-Aged Students

For my elementary school students, this book can ~grow~ their science knowledge on the stages of plant growth! At the end of the book, this page provides great visuals that outline the 4 stages of growth. Using the sorting visual, we can match the seed to the plant throughout the book to work on reading comprehension skills.

I also incorporate movement and assign different stages of growth to different movements to! For the students that have very creative minds, this gives them autonomy and a creative outlet to share ideas and collaborate with the therapist. For example, one of my students assigned a crouched-ball position for the “seed” stage, standing tall with arms together above their head for the “stem” stage, standing tall with legs spread apart and arms out for the “leaves” stage (similar to a starfish), and then moving arms side to side above the head for the “flower” stage. This can be used as music yoga to start sessions to warm up their bodies and minds, or to end sessions to regulate their bodies and calm their minds. For some students, I sing a routine melody to count down from 10 to hold each position and will prompt them to sing “switch” to transition between movements at the end. For some students, I will prompt them to sing the stage of growth that they are representing in the same melody to:

“I am a seed, a seed, a seed, 

I am a seed when I crouch down low,

I am a stem, a stem, a stem,

I am a stem when I stand up straight,

I grow leaves, leaves, leaves,

I grow leaves when I put my arms and legs out,

I am a flower, a flower, a flower,

I am a flower when I sway this way and that!”

Not only does this pair mindfulness and movement along to the song story, but it targets memory and sequencing skills as well across multiple sessions!

For some of my older elementary school students, we can use this page at the end of the book to discuss targeted words and comprehension such as the word “sow” and talk about what it means to “sow” a seed, and the different ways and times of the year we sow different seeds in the book. This page gives a comprehensive visual of the different seeds that we sing about throughout the book.  I use the same melody that I sing in the book to help my students read through some of the plants they are interested in. This normally helps them recall what the seed looks like, learn the time of year to sow the seed, when the seed will grow, and then what will grow!

Thank you for reading! For more blogs about books used in therapy, check out Wild Symphony or We All Go Traveling By.