Planting A Rainbow By Lois Ehlert

Working With Planting A Rainbow By Lois Ehlert

Most people treat this book like decoration for a kid's room. That's not wrong. It is one of those sturdy, washable board-book titles that ends up on a shelf and stays there for years. But if you actually use it as a teaching tool instead of just displaying it, you will notice a few things that the back cover does not mention. The book follows a child who plants bulbs in fall, waits through winter, and then the flowers bloom in order. Each spread pairs a color with a flower and a single planting action. That structure is why it works so well for the two-to-four age bracket. Kids this age need repetition with slight variation, and Ehlert delivers exactly that. The illustrations are cut-paper collage, which gives the book its immediate visual identity. It also means the pages have a slightly raised texture you can feel, which matters for tactile learners. The book teaches sequencing. Fall planting, spring bloom. It teaches color recognition. It teaches that plants need water and light. It does not teach any of this explicitly, but the pattern is there if you point it out. I have seen parents read this in about ninety seconds flat because the text repeats the same sentence structure so often that it feels like a song. That repetition is intentional. It is how kids absorb vocabulary without realizing they are learning.

The Practical Side Of Using This Book

Here is where most people fumble. They read it once and move on. The book only does something useful if you pair it with the actual activity it describes. Take the child outside. Find a patch of dirt or a pot. Put a bulb or seed in the ground. Come back in a few weeks. When the next spring rolls around and you see a crocus or a tulip pushing up through the soil, go back to the book and flip to that page. The connection between the text and the real thing is what actually makes it click. I spent an entire April last year trying to get my nephew to sit still for more than three minutes during story time. Typical kid. Then I had him hold a small trowel while we planted four crocus bulbs in the front yard. He remembered every single page of Planting A Rainbow By Lois Ehlert by the end of it because he had already seen the first green tip poking up through the mulch. The book stopped being an abstract thing with pictures and became a record of something he had actually done. That is the whole trick.

What The Book Leaves Out

Ehlert does not cover everything. The book implies that bulbs go into the ground in the fall and bloom in the spring, but it does not explain day length, soil temperature, or why some bulbs need a cold period. If your child asks why we cannot just plant them in June, you will need a separate answer ready. I tell people to keep a small garden guide or a YouTube video on hand for that age. Something that addresses the actual growing conditions. There is also a geographic limitation that nobody talks about enough. The flowers featured in this book are temperate-zone spring bloomers. Crocus, daffodils, tulips, hyacinths. If you live in a zone where these do not naturally thrive without special treatment, the book will confuse the kid. You buy bulbs, you plant them, they sit in the ground and do nothing for months because your winter was too warm. I ran into this exact problem when a cousin in Southern California tried the same routine. She had to chill the bulbs in the refrigerator for seven weeks before planting. Nothing in the book warns you about that, and I had no idea until it happened to us.

A Better Companion Activity

If you want to stretch the value of this book beyond a single reading session, try a color-sorting exercise alongside it. Lay out eight small containers with soil. Give the child one flower color from the book for each container. Plant the corresponding bulb type. Label each pot with a color sticker. Then track them weekly. This turns a twenty-minute book into a six-week project. It also introduces measurement and observation skills that most kids at that age are just starting to develop. The cut-paper illustration style is worth something on its own if you want to extend into art. I have had children trace the shapes of the flowers using oil pastels on cardstock. The thick black outlines in Ehlert's work make them easy to copy. This does not advance the planting lesson, but it reinforces the color sequence and gives non-readers a way to engage with the material without relying on text.

Things To Avoid

Do not treat this as a science textbook. It is not. Do not read it expecting detailed botanical information. Do not expect children to memorize the Latin names of the flowers. This is a picture book about noticing and sequencing, not a reference work. Trying to force that level of detail out of it will frustrate everyone involved. Also, be careful with the water instruction. The book shows the child watering the planted bulbs. It does not show overwatering or under-watering. In practice, kids tend to dump the watering can in one go. Use a small cup instead. Measure out half a cup per bulb at planting and then once a week after that. That is enough for most container setups and prevents the roots from sitting in standing water. The book itself is widely available in paperback, hardcover, and library editions. Used copies run between two and five dollars if you check ThriftBooks or local library sales. The original 1989 publication date means it is in the public domain in some contexts, but the text and illustrations remain under copyright. Buying a used copy is the straightforward path unless you are a librarian doing interlibrary loan work.

It is a simple book. That simplicity is what makes it work. Pair it with real soil and a real bulb, and it does more for a young child than most of the expensive educational toys sitting on the shelf next to it.