2016
WISE Score
Amazon
A group of grass blades competes to be the 'something-est' in a story that makes learning superlatives actually funny.
4.8
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If you are in the 'my kid is starting to sound out words' phase, this is the gold standard. It manages to be genuinely funny while staying within the strict linguistic guardrails of a Level 1 reader.
Laurie Keller captures the same 'controlled chaos' energy that made the original Elephant & Piggie books work, but uses it to teach specific language structures. It’s a low-stress, high-reward pick for the bedtime rotation that won't make you want to fake a yawn to get it over with.
Ideal for 4-to-7-year-olds. It’s the sweet spot for kids who have mastered the alphabet and are starting to recognize sight words but still need the support of heavy illustration.
It handles the 'everyone is special' trope with actual humor rather than saccharine lectures. The focus on self-acceptance among a group of personified grass blades is emotionally healthy and age-appropriate.
Turning a patch of grass into a competitive social circle is a clever, high-concept move for a book with such a limited vocabulary.
It is a book about grass growing. There is zero objectionable content.
Excellent for early literacy. It uses repetition and speech bubbles to build decoding skills while introducing superlatives and adjectives in a way that sticks.
For many parents, the Elephant & Piggie series is the peak of early literacy. When those run out, the Elephant & Piggie Like Reading! imprint is the logical next step. We Are Growing! is arguably the strongest entry in that curated line. Laurie Keller (of The Scrambled States of America fame) brings her signature frantic, goofy illustration style to a very simple premise: a bunch of grass blades growing up.
From a literacy standpoint, this book is doing a lot of heavy lifting under the hood. It hits the language comprehension strand of the reading rope by playing with superlatives, but it excels at decoding practice. The speech bubbles clearly indicate who is talking, which helps kids understand dialogue flow—a skill that often trips them up when they move to standard prose.
Most 'easy readers' are painfully boring. They use flat sentences like 'The cat sat.' We Are Growing! uses character conflict. Walt’s anxiety about not being the 'tallest' or the 'pointiest' is something every kid feels on the playground. When the lawnmower shows up, it provides a 'crisis' that resets the status quo, teaching kids that growth is a process, not a destination.
If your kid is a 'reluctant reader' who gets overwhelmed by blocks of text, the layout here is your best friend. There's a lot of white space, the font is expressive, and the visual gags do half the storytelling. It's a 'win' book—the kind a kid finishes and immediately asks to read again because they finally feel like they've 'got it.'
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