Thank A Farmer: The Perfect Book for Cross-Curricular Learning

Each year, the Virginia State Literacy Association (VSLA) publishes it’s Readers’ Choice Book List. Students from across the state are invited to vote for their favorite books. I love seeing the list each year because it’s full of great reads that kids approve of and love. It’s a great way to find some new books for your classroom library or your own children. This year’s list is no exception.

My favorite title for the 2025-26 year is Thank A Farmer by Maria Gianferrari. This book is a fantastic choice for the classroom or homeschool. The story follows a a farmer’s day-to-day life – everything from planting and nurturing crops to harvesting – in a way that’s perfect for young readers.

I love that this book shows farm life in different locations and cultures with people of all colors. Kids get to see how different crops grow like tomatoes and rice. They see farmers that raise dairy cows and sheep. There are even illustrations that show all the different kinds of equipment farmers use to perform their jobs shakers that get the fruit off the trees to airplanes that spray the fields.

What makes Thank A Farmer so classroom-friendly is its potential for building cross-curricular lessons and hands-on activities. It’s also a great lead-in for teaching about sustainability, community, and responsibility.

Activities Using Thank A Farmer in Primary Grades

This book is great for primary grades up to third grade! You can tie in so many science, social studies, and math concepts. Here are a few of my favorite activities that will get your students really excited to learn more.

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Social Studies

If teaching about communities is part of your social studies standards, Thank A Farmer is a wonderful choice to supplement your lessons! While the book focuses on farm life, you can easily use it to show how each type of community is important for everyone.

In the book, the farmer gets up bright and early to milk the cows all so we can enjoy milk with our cereal each day. But how do we get that milk? This is where you can talk about each type of community – rural, urban, and suburban – and how they play a role.

The book makes it clear that the rural farm is where our milk comes from, but where does it go next? Well it must be pasteurized and bottled which happen in a factory (urban). Then, the milk to shipped to local grocery stores and markets in every neighborhood (suburban).

To reinforce this concept have your students create a diorama. This really fun, creative, and hands-on activity that kids LOVE!

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Science

If your science curriculum includes a unit on plants, Thank A Farmer is a must-read! First, the story talks about all the different parts of a plant we can eat: leaves, stems, flowers, roots, seeds. You can create an anchor chart and let students add pictures of different foods under each heading (either drawn or cut out of magazines).

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Thank A Farmer is the perfect introduction to agriculture for kids and what better way is there to learn more than by starting a classroom garden?

This is much easier than you think! All you need is a few plastic storage bins, soil, and seeds. I had a big stack of bins left over from our last house move, so I had my husband cut them down and filled them with soil.

In one bin, we planted lettuce seeds. Lettuce grows pretty quickly and is easy to take care of. In the second bin, we planted potatoes. Here’s how our mini gardens look after a couple weeks of growing:

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I like to use plastic bins for our mini gardens because there’s no digging involved, and they are moveable so you can keep them in the sun or cover them during very cold weather.

To grow potatoes, all you need are a few old kitchen potatoes that have sprouted. Cut them into pieces, so there’s at least one sprouted eye per piece. Let them dry out a bit for a day or two, and then pop them into the group with the sprouts sticking up.

Besides growing veggies, you can also tie in lessons on nutrition and food groups. The website myplate.gov has worksheets and activities you can download for free to use with your students. Print out this food groups worksheet to use alongside the book. Students can draw and write foods that come from the farm on their worksheet as you read.

Deo.I love growing vegetables with kids because they get to eat what they grow which is very exciting!

Math

Believe it or not, Thank A Farmer can be incorporated into your math lessons too!

Farmers most often plant their crops in rows, right? Well if you teach second or third grade, this book is a great way to introduce arrays, repeated addition or multiplication, or area with some hands-on math garden activities.

For both of these activities, you’ll need to print a set of number and vegetable cards. You can download a free set right here: Number and Veggie Cards

Vegetable Arrays

For this activity, you will use all of the vegetable cards and just the numbers up to 25. You’ll also need some math manipulatives (unit cubes, chips, or whatever small objects you have).

• Place the number cards in one pile and the vegetable in another.
• Partner your students up.
• Have one partner randomly choose a number card and the other partner a vegetable.
• Give each pair of students a set of manipulatives that matches the number on their card. (i.e. If they chose number 12, give them 12 unit cubes.)

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The task is for students to work together to “plant” their vegetables (manipulatives) in an array of equal rows and columns. Once they use the manipulatives to create their array, they can draw a model of their garden on paper.

The students’ gardens will look different depending on which vegetable and number cards they chose and how many rows and columns they used. Here is an example of student work:

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Area and Perimeter Gardens

In third grade, students begin learning about area and how it relates to multiplication. For this activity, you’ll use all of the number and vegetable cards. You will also need some graph paper.

Partner your students up and randomly assign them a vegetable to plant in their graph paper garden. They will work together to fill in squares on the grid, drawing one plant in each space. Then, they calculate the area of their garden.

Challenge your students by having them come up with more than one arrangement for their plants to see how the area stays the same but the perimeter changes. Here is an example of how that might look:

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Depending on your students’ ability, they may also include a composite shape arrangement.

As you can see, one simple picture book can open the door to so many different opportunities for learning in all different subjects areas! Thematic activities like this are highly engaging for kids and help to tie your lesson together in a meaningful way.

If you’d like to try some of these ideas in your classroom, head on over to Amazon and grab a copy of Thank A Farmer. Don’t forget to download the free number and vegetable cards too!

There are so many wonderful books on the VSLA list this year! Check out all these other posts for more great ideas and free activities to use with your students!