Our Kindergarten Plant Project
I rarely get to do a plant study because the season occurs at the same time as student teacher practicum weeks and often the student teacher choses to teach it, but this year Miss Virgin chose social studies, gym and fine arts.
Our week began with an introduction to plants beginning with seeds. Our study included strands from literacy, math, science, drama and fine arts. Lots of fun!
We sang Over In The Garden, read Jack In The Beanstalk, choral read a silly spring poem and practiced their new emergent book Seeds. They planted green bean seeds in their mini greenhouses and we talked about germination.
We read a non-fiction book on seeds and made a bubble map about what seeds need and decided to soak some leftover beans to see what happens on the inside of the bean. They drew their mini greenhousesin their science journals.
Later during guided writing, the Kinders worked with a small group and created their own flip books on what seeds need.
After about two weeks the kinders checked on their greenhouses and noticed that the seeds had sprouted. They transplanted their seedlings into small clear plastic cups so that they could continue to observations of their bean plants, making sure to move them outside each day so that they received lots of sunshine.
Then we re-read Jack and The Beanstalk and compared it to a book by Eric Carle, The Tiny Seed. The Kinders made a flower glyph using the tissue art flowers from Growing Kinders as inspiration.
During centres I worked with smalls groups doing a guided drawing of a flower and the Kinders added interesting details like bugs, grass and the sun. Instead of using paper we drew on flower pots with our black sharpies and sent them home for Mother's day with a small perennial in it. They were perfect! (I'll look for a photo)
As we had been working with watercolours many of the kinders made watercolour flowers and umbrellas to decorate the classroom window and some of them used waterclour paint for their Mother day cards while others chose pencil crayons or crayons.
We read a different version of Jack In The Beanstalk (with fun lift the flaps) that I picked up at a sale table and the kinders compared the story elements with the first version first orally and then using a venn diagram. The next day we re-read the story and they worked in small groups to create a flow map of the story. Later a few kinders used the flow map strategy to write the life cycle of a flower during free choice! I just love these thinking maps. I introduce a new thinking about once monthly and then keep referring back to them. But that's a different topic for a different day.
After visiting Katie Mense's blog, littlewarriors.blogspot.com I had to include her fun pollination activity that I purchased from tpt. I introduced the lesson with a non-fiction book about bees and recorded what their knew about pollination. To prepare for the activity I had already printed out a small white flower and glued it onto a paper bag cut down to half size and filled each bag with about fifteen cheetos. Then using bee finger puppets (provided by Katie) the Kinders were assigned a partner and then buzzed in and out of their own bag eating the cheetos. They flew their bee over to their partner's bag and landed on his/hert flower leaving cheeto dust. The cheeto dust was the "pollen". Finally they drew and wrote in their science journals about their new word. It was so much fun!
We read a different version of Jack In The Beanstalk (with fun lift the flaps) that I picked up at a sale table and the kinders compared the story elements with the first version first orally and then using a venn diagram. The next day we re-read the story and they worked in small groups to create a flow map of the story. Later a few kinders used the flow map strategy to write the life cycle of a flower during free choice! I just love these thinking maps. I introduce a new thinking about once monthly and then keep referring back to them. But that's a different topic for a different day.
After visiting Katie Mense's blog, littlewarriors.blogspot.com I had to include her fun pollination activity that I purchased from tpt. I introduced the lesson with a non-fiction book about bees and recorded what their knew about pollination. To prepare for the activity I had already printed out a small white flower and glued it onto a paper bag cut down to half size and filled each bag with about fifteen cheetos. Then using bee finger puppets (provided by Katie) the Kinders were assigned a partner and then buzzed in and out of their own bag eating the cheetos. They flew their bee over to their partner's bag and landed on his/hert flower leaving cheeto dust. The cheeto dust was the "pollen". Finally they drew and wrote in their science journals about their new word. It was so much fun!
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