The Word Garden

Welcome to the Word Garden, where Mia and Leo learn how special words can be!

Mia loved to read. She collected words like treasures. "Words are like seeds," she told her new neighbor Leo. "They grow when you share them."

Leo was shy. He had just moved to the neighborhood and didn't know anyone. "I don't have many words," Leo whispered. "Sometimes they get stuck."

That's okay," said Mia. "We can plant some words together in my special garden. When we water them with kindness, they grow bigger and stronger."

First, they planted "Hello" and "Friend." Leo carefully patted the soil around each word. "These are good starting words," said Mia with a smile.

"Now we wait and take care of our words," Mia explained. "When we use kind words with each other, they bloom. The alphabetic principle helps us read all kinds of words" (Auxier, 2013).

Each day, Leo visited the garden with Mia. Soon, Leo wasn't so shy anymore. "Look!" he exclaimed. "Our words are growing, and so is my confidence!"

They planted more words: "Thank you," "Please," and "Let's play together." Leo especially liked planting "Story" and "Listen" because "fluency grows out of a solid background in multiliteracies" (Auxier, 2013).

By the end of summer, their Word Garden was bursting with colorful words. Leo had made friends with everyone in the neighborhood. He wasn't shy about speaking anymore.

"Our Word Garden helped me find my voice," said Leo to Mia. "And now we can share our words with everyone!"

Remember, the most beautiful gardens grow when we plant kind words and help each other.

Auxier, J. (2013). Visual, gestural, and spatial literacies for the new reader. In Children's Literature in the Reading Program: Engaging Young Readers in the 21st Century (Chapter 8).

Auxier, J. (2013). Young readers: Audio and linguistic literacies. In Children's Literature in the Reading Program: Engaging Young Readers in the 21st Century (Chapter 9).