July 5, 2026 By Maria
My daughter loves strawberries. Well, all my kids do, but especially my daughter. . . and me. We will eat strawberries whole, cut up, with yogurt and honey, cereal or granola, on waffles, on ice cream, in dessert, and so on. My personal favorite fruit combination is strawberries, blueberries and peaches. Yum! One year, after watching some videos online, I decided we would try to grow our own strawberries from seeds saved from the berries we ate. That project was a complete failure, but last year I bought a couple plants, which gave us about five berries last year. They survived winter and we hope to get more strawberries this season. According to friends, who have successfully grown strawberries, the first year gets very little berries.
The first time we attempted to grow strawberries, we also listened to a podcast episode about strawberries, which inspired our homeschool strawberry unit study that year. (At the end of this post I will include some links with information I referred to when putting together our strawberry unit study). When I decided on the unit study, of course that meant I needed to find strawberry books. I didn’t know of any strawberry stories, so it took some googling, library catalog searching, and investigating unit study plans that teachers and homeschoolers had shared online to find our pile of strawberry books. Today, I’d like to share a couple of books from my strawberry book stack.
First from the stack is a nonfiction informative book called Grow Your Own Strawberries by Helen Lanz. This book is packed with information and photos which not only tell you how to grow your own strawberry plants but also how the strawberry plant grows and develops. By reading this book we learned that even if our seed experiments sprouted it would take a whole year for us to get any fruit from our plants. That was a disappointment, but it didn’t stop us from learning about and eating strawberries as we learned more about berry cultivation.
While cultivating my list of strawberry books, I discovered an instant favorite: I Love Strawberries by Shannon Anderson and illustrated by Jaclyn Sinquett. This book tells an endearing story of a girl, Jolie, who wants to grow her own strawberry garden. I enjoyed her antics and strawberry journal entries that are included in the book. In the illustrations we see that Jolie is biracial. I like how this isn’t the focus of the story, just a natural part of it. My husband is Chinese American and I am Caucasian, so I am always happy to find a book like this. I appreciate the way mixed racial families are normalized, not stigmatized in this book. We learned about strawberries and loved the story, too. My daughter was very impressed and excited by how many strawberries Jolie was able to grow.
We are somewhat patiently waiting for our strawberry plants to bloom this year. The very first teeny tiny green berry just started in early May. We have had seven berries so far this year. My daughter and I had so much fun with our strawberry unit study and we are still enjoying the process of growing our own strawberries. (Though we do wish the plants would grow a little faster.) I am grateful for how much I learn while teaching my kids and how many times picture books have surprised me. I have learned quite a lot from picture books over the years. What have you learned while reading to a kid?
As promised the additional strawberry sources:
Homeschool Nature Study: Strawberries (ourjourneywestward.com)
Strawberry Unit Study | Sarah’s Sweeties (wordpress.com)
Strawberry Unit Study | Home Educators Association Of Virginia (heav.org)
More Bookshelves Please 