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.