What You Will Need

A paper cup

Soil - potting soil is best

Carrot seeds

What To Do

After you read the story to your preschooler, ask him if he'd like to grow something special too. Help your preschooler fill the cup with potting soil. Let your preschooler poke a couple of holes about 1/4" deep in the soil. Then take a pinch of carrot seeds and put them in your preschooler's hand. Let him try to put the carrot seeds in each hole. This may be tricky as carrot seeds are very small. Cover the seeds with about 1/4" loose soil.

Now let your preschooler spray the soil with a spray bottle. You may have to add a little more water to keep the soil damp. Place it in a sunny window. Be sure to let your preschooler spray the water every day. If he doesn't water quite enough, you may need to help out a little bit, but don't put in too much water.

Each day ask your preschooler, "Do you think it will come up?" Carrots can take a couple of weeks to sprout, so your preschooler will have to be very patient and remember the story of the carrot seed.

Alternatively, you can also plant your carrots directly into a garden early in the spring. Carrots do like the cold weather.

After the Activity

After your carrots sprout, they'll probably grow better if transplanted to a garden. But you can keep the carrots in the cup. Just keep watering it. Let your preschooler thin the carrots so that each carrot will have some room to grow. You can wash off these tiny, skinny carrots you pull out and then let your preschooler eat them. When the other carrots get bigger, pull them out, wash and eat those too.

Hi! I'm Molly Christensen, the Preschool Books writer at PreschoolRock.com. I have five wonderful children, ranging in age from 1 to 12. We own hundreds and hundreds of books and we all read a lot! I love playing games and reading with preschoolers and I often teach preschool classes. If you have a good book you'd like to recommend or just want to share your ideas and suggestions, please contact me.

Helpful Tips for Parents

• Audiobooks count as reading. Children who listen to audiobooks develop the same comprehension, vocabulary, and story-structure understanding as children read to by adults.

• Children's picture books are not dumbed-down literature — the best ones (Where the Wild Things Are, Charlotte's Web, Goodnight Moon) reward re-reading across decades.

• Read nonfiction books alongside fiction. Nonfiction expands vocabulary with domain-specific words that fiction rarely delivers, and builds informational reading habits.

• Wordless picture books (The Snowman, Tuesday, Flotsam) develop narrative comprehension, story structure understanding, and visual literacy — without any words at all.

Frequently Asked Questions

My preschooler wants the same book read over and over. Should I allow this?

Absolutely — repeated reading of favorite books is both normal and highly beneficial. With each reading, children understand more: they catch details they missed, connect the story to new experiences, and increasingly delight in predicting what happens next. The request to re-read is a sign of deep engagement, not a cognitive limitation. Never replace a requested re-read with a book you've chosen — follow the child's reading lead. Boredom with a book you've read 30 times doesn't mean the child is bored.

Are audiobooks as beneficial as physical books read aloud?

Audiobooks develop many of the same literacy skills as adult read-alouds: vocabulary, comprehension, story structure, and phonological awareness. The primary difference: a skilled narrator or author reading their own work often delivers superior prosody (the musical rise and fall of language) compared to a tired parent reading at bedtime. The primary advantage of parent read-alouds: the social interaction — pointing, questioning, discussing — that maximizes comprehension. Both are valuable; neither should entirely replace the other.

Related reading: See also our library tips guide and our picture books for empathy for more ideas on this topic.

🎓 Skills Your Child Will Develop

• 🖼️ Visual Literacy — Reading pictures — interpreting what they show, what details they add, how they relate to the words — develops visual literacy: the ability to extract meaning from images that underlies comprehension of graphs, diagrams, and media.
• 🔢 Story Structure Understanding — Following a story's arc — beginning, problem, resolution, ending — builds the narrative schema that makes complex texts comprehensible and supports children's own storytelling and writing development.
• 😊 Love of Reading — Every positive reading experience — a funny book, an exciting story, a perfectly timed cuddle — builds the reading identity and intrinsic motivation that sustains literacy development through the independent reading years.
• 🗣️ Language Fluency — Exposure to the complex sentence structures, rich vocabulary, and varied grammatical patterns of written language — more complex than everyday speech — builds linguistic fluency that distinguishes strong readers and communicators.

The Carrot Seed

Story by Ruth Krauss

Pictures by Crocket Johnson

This is a beloved story of a boy who plants a seed, but no one believes it will ever come up. But, just like the boy knew it would, something special happens! You and your preschooler can have something special happen too.