The Ugly Vegetables

 

Title- The Ugly Vegetables

Author/Retold- Grace Lin

Illustrator- Grace Lin

Genre- multicultural book

Grade level- 2nd-4th grade

The story begins with a mother and daughter digging to create a garden. The daughter starts to see the neighbors start to make their own gardens and sees the difference between their garden and the neighbors. A big difference was the Chinese characters her mother put in the garden and she asked why are u putting these in the ground and not the seed packages like everyone else. She said because we are growing Chinese vegetables. Through the next coming days she saw how the beautiful and amazing smelling flowers started to grow and bloom in the neighbors garden and how their garden grew weird and ugky looking vegetables. The daughter wanted beautiful flowers, but she got veggies. One day she smelled something so nice and delicious and so did everyone in the neighborhood and the smell was coming from her house. The smell was the vegetables from the garden and they were put into a soup and the daughter said to was so delicious she ate 5 bowls full. The neighbors came and traded flowers for bowls of soup. The next year everyone had grown flowers and Chinese vegetables in their garden. 

The book is great for setting the tone for a multicultural classroom. It talks about Chinese culture and shows how people accept it, rather than belittle it. This could be a great use for sharing student experiences with their cultures and how some cultures are similar and different. This book helps to invoke the acceptance of a diverse culture into the classroom.