Plants: Part 3

Agriculture

I wanted to be sure that we covered agriculture before moving on from plants. After all, basically every bit of energy we consume ultimately comes from plants. So, we started with a basic question: why do people grow plants?


Books:

• Corn: A True Book by Elaine Landau
• Soy Una Manzana por Jean Marzollo
• What's on My Plate? by Ruth Belov Gross
• Eating the Alphabet by Lois Ehlert
• Vegetable Soup by Lois Ehlert
• Up, Down, and Around by Katherine Ayres
• Pierrot's ABC Garden by Anita Lobel

Activities: 

• Outdoors: Gardening with great-grandpa! Evie has been looking forward to this for weeks. She loves getting out into the garden with her great-grandpa. He has been a gardener his entire life, and knows more about plants and agriculture than anyone I know. He has a serious green thumb. I was never really much for gardening, but Evie seems to have a real interest in it, and I really want to foster that interest. Hence, we spent time with the best gardener I know. They planted peanuts, sunflowers, potatoes, beans, and a few other vegetables. She also planted some flowers with great-grandma (including marigolds, geraniums, and morning glories). It was nice to see her spending time with my grandma and grandpa, learning from them and getting her hands dirty. Her attention span was a bit short for planting seeds, though. She vastly prefers harvesting. So when we go back to reap what we have sown, she will be a very happy little girl. 

• Outdoors: Gardening with daddy! We have two raised garden beds of our own, and my husband built irrigation systems for them. He showed Evie how they work, and she watched as he set up the lattice work. She also watched my dad do the rototilling. Then Jake brought home the tomato plants that we had all planted a few months ago at his office, and they planted them and tied them to stakes. They planted some beans and pumpkins. She watched him spread mulch. I sat with her for a few minutes, and we examined one of the tomato plants. I asked her if she remembered the parts of a plant, and she showed them to me. We talked about photosynthesis. Then we dispersed worms from two containers of crawlers that my husband had purchased. Evie is just like me: she's always up for playing with worms. 

• Pretend play: farmer's market. We set up a veggie & fruit stand in the playroom, and played farmer's market (she was the farmer, and I was the buyer). We also sorted the foods by color, and named them in Spanish. We talked about what kinds of food you could make with the produce. 

• Grocery store trip. The supermarket is a wonderful place to see many kinds of produce. It's all gathered in a small area, and you can walk around with your toddler and show them everything they're curious about. They can touch, weigh, and bag the produce, and find out where each fruit or vegetable came from. Also, while waiting in line to check out, we looked at the ingredients on some of the boxes, to find out just how much is made from plant products. 

Plants Part 2: 

Botanical Biodiversity and Plant Life Cycle

For this part of our plant study, we focused on all the many types of flora on the planet. We looked at pictures of flowers and cacti and ferns, and talked about the few plants that DON'T make their own food.
We covered the basics: parts of a flower, the plant life cycle, and what plants need to survive.
The main book we used for this was actually a textbook: Explore and Learn Volume 3: the Natural World from Southwestern Advantage. This book is simple, laid out very well, and has great illustrations. We covered pages 12-37. It was a good launchpad for several plant-related topics.


Books:

• Atlas of Plants (A First Discovery Book) byGallimard Jeunesse, Claude Delafosse, and Sylvaine Perols
• De Semilla a Planta por Melvin and Gilda Berger
• Totally Amazing Plants (Golden Books) by Deborah Kespert and Julia Hillyard
• The Magic School Bus Plants Seeds by Joanna Cole
• See the Cactus by Danielle Shustermann
• Cactus Hotel by Brenda Z. Guiberson
• The Tiny Seed by Eric Carle

Activities

• Outdoors: We picked many flowers that we found in the yard, and pressed them. We will check on them in two weeks! Then we will add them to a binder that I bought (an album with adhesive sheets). 

• Experiment: Food coloring and white flowers. I've been wanting to do this with Evie for a while, but I've been waiting until we had enough white flowers blooming in the yard. So when the lily-of-the-valleys all flowered, we went out and gathered some (along with some other white blooms we found). We put food coloring in four small glasses (red, green, yellow and blue), and added the flowers. Some of them changed color in a matter of minutes, and others were a bit slower, and became more vibrant with time. The lily-of-the-valley were surprising, in that the color appeared on them in stripes, rather than dyeing the entire flower (it made the flowers in red water look like peppermints!). This simple experiment was an excellent way to show Evie how water travels up the stems and is distributed throughout the plant. We talked about the veins in the plant, and how minerals are also pulled up with the water. Though these were cut stems, we also talked about how roots anchor the plant in the soil, in addition to sucking up water. Evie really loved this experiment, and it would be fun to do again with bigger flowers, such as roses or carnations. 

• Activity: Seed to plant model. I ordered a foam puzzle/model of the seed-to-plant transformation. This turned out to be a lot of fun. Evie took it apart and put it back together several times. As she did this, I read aloud to her about how seeds sprout and grow. 

• Experiment: Lima bean sprout houses. We soaked lima beans in water, then put them in sandwich baggies, along with wet paper towel. Then, we cut out colorful frames from construction paper, and taped them up on the playroom windows. We created a "log" to track the progress of our sprouts. I also had Evie choose which seed (in one of the bags) she thought would sprout first. We'll see if her prediction is correct!

Bonus: Tadpole update!!!! Our American Toad babies are growing exponentially. They are now mostly carnivorous, and particularly enjoy worms.