Harvey Potter wasn’t your ordinary farmer. He didn’t grow corn or potatoes or cotton. Harvey Potter grew balloons! His balloons grew straight from the ground, bursting with magnificent colors and all different shapes and faces. Harvey Potter himself was quite plain. What wasn’t so plain was the conjure stick he carried with him everywhere he went. A jealous farmer, Wheezle Mayfield, calls the government on Harvey Potter to investigate the balloons. But the government found nothing wrong with the balloons, so Harvey Potter was given the right to grow them. A young girl, who is the narrator of the story, is interested in Harvey Potter. She spends days sitting on his porch talking to him. However, she never asks how he grows his balloons. She knows he wouldn’t disclose his secret anyway. One night, she waited for him to go outside to plant his balloons. She was amazed by what she saw. Harvey Potter started dancing with the conjure stick, which had begun to glow an orange color. The two rose straight up in the air. Next, the stick jumped up and down across the field in neat rows. Suddenly, it stopped and flew right back into Harvey Potter’s hand. The next morning, the young girl wakes to find tiny balloons growing in the ground. He lets her take a few, and grows a big balloon that takes the young girl to a new town, so that she can start a new life. The time moves to the present, where the young girl is now a grown woman who has been growing her own balloons (in a different way than Harvey Potter) for thirty-two years.
This book could be used as a fun introduction to a science lesson. You could give students “mystery seeds”, and their job is to plant the seeds and observe their growth. They can record data in their science journals, and compare their plant to other students in the class. As the plants grow bigger, the students’ job is to find peers who have the same plant as them, and investigate to figure out which plant or flower that they were given. This is a fun twist on the traditional lesson where all the students are given the same plant. This way, children can see how different types of plants grow and what they look like during different stages of growth.
