Plant Unit

My class has been doing a plant theme since the end of March. The first thing we did was find out what the children knew...

We began to teach them about the parts of a plant using felt board pieces and labels. They love putting the flower together by themselves! Make sure you also talk about how plants need air and that even though they don't have a mouth, they still have to breath like we do, only we breath we oxygen and they breath carbon dioxide.

Of course then, we had to plant our own seeds to watch them grow and we began to measure and record the height of them as they grew. The red line was the first day we measured and the blue line is for the second day.

We read the book The Grouchy Ladybug by Eric Carle. It talks about how the ladybugs eat the aphids which eat leaves. So I made an interactive chart of a tree with leaves containing different numbers of aphids on each one that they have to match with the number on the branch of the tree.

We also took a nature walk on which we found several different types of flowers, plants and seeds. This is a milkweed pod that is obviously dried up from the winter, but it was a good example to show the kids how the seeds are connected to the feathery part which makes them fly further away from the plant. This opens up a discussion about why plants want their seeds to fall away from them so that their roots will have plenty of room to grow and plenty of water. Also, you can talk about other methods plants use to spread their seeds such as animals eating the fruit or having them stick to their fur, helicopter seeds from trees, and the way the wind blows seeds from a dandelion.

We are now currently wrapping up our plant unit and working on making a book for documentation of what the children have learned. I will post pictures of it when finished.