Guiding Comprehension

Cause and Effect

• Inferential

Why is Lydia Grace going to
live with her Uncle Jim?

Her family is going through a
hard time and can’t afford to
take care of her.

then… use the skill and strategy instruction
on p. 287.

If… students are unable to determine the cause of
Lydia’s move,

Cause and Effect

Setting • Critical

Text to World In the 1930s,
many people in the United
States could not find jobs.
Why is this fact important for
this story?

The story takes place in 1935
and 1936. The narrator’s
parents don’t have jobs either.
That’s why she has to move.

Use the keywords The Great Depression, New Deal, Black Tuesday, and Life in the 1930s to find out more information about the time period in which the story takes place.

SKILLS

STRATEGIES IN CONTEXT

Cause/Effect

TEACH

Explain that understanding
cause and effect is important
to understanding a text.
Sometimes clue words in the
text, such as because, since,
or so, signal a cause and effect
relationship. Other times we
have to look for the causes
and effects without the help
of clue words.
To find the cause, we ask
ourselves why something
happened; to find the effect,
we ask ourselves what happened.

MODEL Lydia Grace writes
that she is going to live
with her uncle. I wonder why. What happened to her family? She says that she needs to live with
him “until things get better.” She mentions that her papa has been
out of work for a long time, and
nobody asks her mother to make
dresses for them. Her parents
probably don’t have much money.
That’s probably the cause of Lydia’s moving.

PRACTICE AND ASSESS

Have students think about why
everyone started crying when
they were talking about the
family’s situation. To assess,
check that students’ causes
follow logically from the story.

Exaggeration

Explain that exaggeration is
something overstated and made
to seem greater than it really is.
It is used to emphasize. For
example, if we are sad, we
might say, “My heart is breaking!”
Our heart isn’t really breaking,
but we want to emphasize how
sad we are. Exaggeration is
common in everyday speaking
and also in realistic fiction. It
makes the characters seem more
real. Have students look through
The Gardener and identify
examples of exaggeration. Point
out that sometimes exclamation
marks are a clue.

"The Gardener"
by Sarah Stewart

Student Edition
Unit 3, pp. 284–297

Realistic fiction is a made-up story that could happen in real life. What parts of this Snapshot could really happen?

Lydia Grace Finch loved flowers. She and Grandma spent many hours working in their garden at home. Now, Lydia Grace was going to live with Uncle Jim in the city. The year was 1935, in the heart of the Great Depression. She would stay with Uncle Jim until Papa found work and times got better at home. She took a train ride by herself to get there.
Lydia Grace was excited when she saw Uncle Jim's place. There were window boxes! She would be able to plant flowers, after all. She had feared that the city would have no place for plants to grow.
Lydia Grace was supposed to help Uncle Jim in the bakery, but she didn't know how to knead bread. Emma and Ed Beech, who worked there, offered to teach her about baking. In return, Emma wanted to learn from Lydia Grace about plants.
Almost every night, Lydia Grace wrote to Mama, Papa, and Grandma while Uncle Jim tried not to doze off as he read his paper. In her letters, Lydia Grace told them about the bakery and its window boxes. She usually asked them about Uncle Jim. She wondered if he had a sense of humor, because he never laughed or even smiled.
For Christmas Mama and Papa and Grandma sent her seed catalogues. Grandma also sent her flower bulbs to plant so they would bloom in the spring.
Throughout the winter, Lydia Grace planned for the spring planting of the window boxes. One day, when she was exploring the bakery building, she found a wonderful flat roof. Recognizing that it was a perfect place for a city garden, Lydia Grace became excited. She collected cups and dented cake pans and other containers to use as flowerpots. She brought up good soil from a vacant lot down the street. She planted bulbs and seeds in her new secret place.
Spring brought days of warm sun and soft rain showers. This was just what the plants needed to grow. Tiny plants began sprouting in the window boxes and in the containers in the rooftop garden. Before long, flowers were blooming everywhere.
One day in May, Lydia Grace told Emma about the secret place, and Emma began to help her with the garden. Mama and Papa and Grandma sent tiny plants from home. Neighbors and customers brought in containers and even plants from their own gardens. Lydia Grace was now called "the gardener." But still Uncle Jim hadn't smiled.
Lydia Grace had not told Uncle Jim about the rooftop garden. She planned to surprise him with it as part of their Fourth of July celebration with Emma and Ed. On the holiday Lydia Grace led Uncle Jim to the rooftop garden. She was sure the beauty of the hundreds of blooms would bring a smile to his face. It didn't.
But one day the very next week, Uncle Jim closed the bakery at lunch time. He sent Emma, Ed, and Lydia Grace up to the rooftop to wait for him. Now it was his turn to give a surprise.
He brought them a cake covered in flowers to thank them for the garden. Lydia Grace said in a letter home that his cake was worth a thousand smiles.
Uncle Jim had other news too. Lydia Grace's papa had finally found work. She was going home! She would give all of her plants to Emma and be back to help Grandma garden at home.
And she would always remember the garden that had made Uncle Jim happy.



	Close
	Interdependence Have you ever thought about how we depend on nature for our food? In order to grow, almost everything we eat needs sunlight, water, good soil, and the right temperatures. Even most food that comes out of a can or a box is made with vegetables and grains that depend on nature. Nature depends on us too. If farmers aren't careful to rotate crops, feed the soil, conserve water, and produce healthy plants that can resist pests and disease, they risk destroying the very nature they rely on to grow our food. So the next time you are at the grocery store, think about how the food got there and what we can do to make sure it will always be there. Context Clues Explain to students that when we come across a word we don't know, we can try to use the words around it to help us figure out what it means. Point out the word anxious on p. 287. In the preceding sentence, Lydia Grace says she doesn't know anything about baking. She says she's "anxious to learn to bake." The context clues tell us that anxious means "excited, anticipating"; Lydia Grace wants to learn to bake. Have students use context clues to figure out the meaning of another word they don't know. Allow students to verify the meaning in an English dictionary or a bilingual dictionary if necessary.

"The Gardener" by Sarah Stewart

"The Gardener"
by Sarah Stewart