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Plants are an important source of life in our world. They clean our air, they provide us with food, and they cool us in their shade. Around the world, people have found joy and peace in tending gardens and planting flowers. Learning about what makes plants grow and thrive is a constant process that many people take a lifetime to perfect.
The joys of learning can be given to your children when you teach them about plants using a hands-on process rather than from a textbook. When life and learning go hand-in-hand, children will continue to learn long into adulthood. These five activities can be done as part of your lifestyle or as a short unit study with your children.
Plant a vegetable garden together.
In the springtime, my children are right beside me, playing in the dirt and finding worms while I plant my flowers and prepare my vegetable garden. As they have grown older, I give them more to do to help. This has become our springtime routine so that from very young ages they have understood where plants come from and what seeds are for.
Sprout seeds found in the kitchen.
Collect several glass or clear plastic containers and fill them full of water and cotton balls. In the containers, plant popcorn kernels, beans, whole grain barley, fennel seed, or whatever whole foods you have in your pantry. You could even pick a few apple seeds out of an apple.
In several days, these seeds will sprout. You can see both the new seedling and its roots. If you would like to take this experiment further, you can transplant the seedlings into a larger glass full of rocks and water. The rocks will give the plants support as they grow.
Explore the parts of a seed and the parts of a flower.
Soak some beans in some water and set them on the counter for a day. The next day, peel off the outer layer of the bean, and pull the bean apart. Inside, you will see seedling curled up inside the bean. It has not yet received the right conditions to grow, but it is still there, lying dormant.
You can also take apart flowers. If you open them up carefully, you can inspect the pistil and the stamens. The best part is the seed pod, which may or may not be pollinated. My morning glories were excellent for this project. The seed pod was just the right size to inspect. When the seeds were pollinated, they were black. Otherwise, they were white. You can follow this up with an age-appropriate library book on the parts of plants and the lifecycle of seeds.
Make paint out of flowers.
Paint construction paper by crushing grass and different colored flowers against the paper with a rock. Cut out interesting shapes from the colored paper, like butterflies or stars. Then hang the shapes as a mobile. After doing this project, discuss and read about chlorophyll, the green pigment in plants, and how plants use chlorophyll to photosynthesize, which is the process of turning sunlight into energy.
Take a nature hike.
Bring field guides for trees and flowers to your local arboretum. Look up the trees and flowers you find to learn how to identify plants by type. You can start a nature journal by collecting samples, drawing pictures, and writing descriptions about what you see.
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