Its the new year! now that the irregular holiday schedule is over and I am done with most of the preparatory work for the year, I will be out at the centers doing garden lessons on a regular basis. While it is still too cold to start planting, I'll be doing indoor garden related activities designed to help the kids understand the lifecycle of a plant and where food comes from. Here's a couple of the plans I have in store for January & February:
Make a garden journal- to reflect on what they learn through the year
Seed sprouting- to observe how a plant grows: what it looks like, how long it takes
Indoor planting herbs- observe more on how plants grow, what they need to thrive
Books- We just got some great new preschool appropriate garden books for the centers, that will help familiarize the kids with new fruits and vegetables as well as help them spell, count, and read! These big beautifully illustrated books will be great rainy day activities for the kids. These are the ones we will be using:
Eating the Alphabet: Fruits & Vegetables from A to Z, by Lois Ehlert
From the Garden: A counting book about growing food, by Michael Dahl
Growing Vegetable Soup, by Lois Ehlert
At Silverton we've already done the sprouting activity and the kids have had a chance to reflect on it.
All that is needed for this activity is a ziploc bag, some seeds and some wet papertowels. I used leftover cover crop seeds and soaked them the night before to help with germination. The teachers and I helped the kids with this activity so some of the baggies are neater than others. As the seed sprouts the kids will get to observe what the roots look like and how long they take to grow. I figure this is a good activity to start off a new year of the program. I'll post more pictures as we take them
For anyone interested in doing this activity- When we used staples in the middle of the bag to hold the seeds up on the wet paper towels (see top picture) the seeds grew much better than when we let the seeds fall to the bottom of the bag (see the last picture in this post, directly above).
ReplyDeleteAlso, make sure you soak the seeds the night before you do this activity, otherwise most won't sprout!