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.