Note to mentor: Please send your mentee the entire lesson. Please do more with synonyms and adjectives if you feel your mentee can cope with it. Please have your mentee write his or her own version of ‘Vegetable Rainbows!’
Carrots and Nutrition
The earliest carrots came from Afghanistan. They were mostly purple and skinny. There may have been black and red carrots, too, but no orange and yellow.
In the 1700’s, Dutch scientists bred the pale orange carrot. Dutch botanists also got rid of the bitter taste of the original wild carrot.
Carrots have beautiful, lacy white flowers. Carrot tea, made from dried carrot leaves, was supposed to help people survive the pain of kidney stones.
Carrots have huge amounts of Vitamin A. If you eat too many carrots you might turn yellow, but it goes away after you stop eating them.
1. Find words that say the same thing. Different words that have the same meaning are synonyms.
Example of a synonym: ‘Earliest’ in the first sentence can be substituted with ‘first.’ ‘Earliest’ and ‘first’ are examples of synonyms.
Find synonyms in the text for:
1. Thin
2. Grew (past tense of ‘to grow’) Hint: ‘To breed’ is the present tense of this verb.
3. A plant scientist
4. A native of the Netherlands
5. To ‘live beyond’ or ‘ endure’
6. Large
7. Quantities
2. What is an adjective? An adjective is a word that describes other words or nouns. Words like small, blue, and sharp are descriptive, and they are all examples of adjectives.
What three adjectives describe carrot flowers in this text?
Name three adjectives that describe carrots.
Find the adjectives in the following sentences:
Example: I love juicy, red apples.
‘Juicy’ and ‘red’ are adjectives.
1. I love sweet mangoes.
2. Ruksana’s brother is tall and skinny.
3. I looked up and saw the blue sky and the fluffy white clouds.
4. He studies in poor light. His eyesight has become weak.
5. She drove at high speed on the bumpy road.
6. Sushma put fragrant, white flowers in her hair.
3. Did you know:
What do you call a scientist who studies plants? A botanist
What do you call a scientist who studies animals? A zoologist
What do you call a scientist who studies birds? An ornithologist
4. Vegetable Rainbows
There are many coloured vegetables.
They are good for you.
Carrots are orange, let’s eat a few.
Beans are green, let’s try them, too.
Corn is yellow, tomatoes are red.
When you eat a rainbow,
You know you are well fed!
5. “The day is coming when a single carrot freshly observed will set off a revolution.”—-Paul Cezanne.
Paul Cezanne (1839 – 1906) was a very famous French painter.