Botany

May 18, 2013

Botany~ Flowers

Stephanie Botany, Field Trips, Homeschooling, Learning with Play, Nature Walk, Uncategorized 2 Comments

Well this is it! I am officially here to let you know that our school year is over! Ok…for right now! 😉 I have grand plans for an ocean study before we head there on vaction, but for all intensive purposes we are all done! This week we wrapped up our botany lessons by talking about flowers! Honestly it was a really fun lesson and great way to end the year! Bunny loved it and so did Pup! We even threw in a field trip to the Botanical Gardens! Bunny really seemed to absorb all the information that she needed to. We started off by talking about the parts of a flower. I was so excited to have received a beautiful boquet of flowers for Mothers Day. It had Lilys, Crsanthimums, roses, and carnations. It was the perfect way to explore all different kinds of flowers. We started with lily since it is the perfect flower to see the all the parts. After we diseceted the flower, Pup matched the parts of the flower to the nomenclature cards. Bunny and I labled them and added the parts of the the pistil and the stamen. Bunny really like this and we ended up dissecting about 6 flowers! While Bunny was working on the flowers we were able to talk about the different kinds of flowers, like the compound flower and the perfect flower, since we were working with so many different varieties.

The next day, I pulled out some q-tips to tlk about pollination of flowers and what flowers are for! The idea came from here and the q-tip was colored yellow to represent the bee. We then moved the bee from flower to flower to show how the pollen needs to move from flower to flower. The girls loved this. We talked about how the pollen travels down the pistil to form a new seed. It was fun to “see” how this happened. I was able to go out to our garden and see the overy of the daffidols swollen up and the flower dead after it was pollonated. We also cut one open to see the seeds starting to form. Don’t you love it when the perfect learning materials are right where you need them?

We ended the study with a trip to the botanical gardens! There wasn’t too much in bloom yet since the bulbs are mostly done and the preneinals are just getting planted, but there was tons of great stuff to look at! We had some friends join us which always makes it more fun! 🙂

Here is our friend discovering a robin’s nest in the tree! There were eggs! We quickly left after that, but I did manage to grab a picture! 🙂

As you can see we had a great time! With their interest in the flowers we managed to cover quite a lot our Botany album in a very short amount of time. It was a really fun way to learn and play at the same time! Happy Schooling (and almost summer)! I linking up over at the Weekly Kids Co-Op, Virtual Montessori Fair, and The Ultimate Homeschool Link Up!

PS: As you can see, I am still having some issues working out the pictures! I promise to get it worked out soon! 🙂

May 14, 2013

Montessori Monday~ Botany~ Stem Week

Stephanie Botany, Homeschooling, Montessori Monday, Montessori Work Day, Nature Walk 6 Comments

Hi there everyone! I am happy to report that the this new site is ready for some new posts! Hooray! I have missed sharing all our fun! However, I am begging you to hang in there with me, things are messy all over, but we are working on getting it all there!

Last week we spent a lot of time talking about the stems of a plant! We observed how the plant takes water up from the roots by letting some celery suck up some food colored water! The girls love seeing this! It is such a basic experiment that never fails to seem like magic to kids! My girls are no exception! It was really amazing to see how the food coloring really allows you to see the veins of the leaf too!

While we waited for the celery to become magical, we talked about the two different types of stems~ Woody and herbaceous. After a quick talk about the differences we walked the neighbor hood figuring out which ones were which in the plants we saw. The girls were quick to understand it. I have found that although it is fun to sort cards, most of the time my girls would prefer to get out there and see it for real!

Another thing we did last week was talk about the parts of a woody steam and look at an old stump in the neighbors yard! (She didn’t mind). Bunny thought it was interesting that they get new rings every year.

Finally, to make the week a little fun, we decided to paint plants with all their parts! Not only that, but I thought it would be fun to use mediums to see how different each picture looked. We used water color pencils, watercolors, and tempera paint. They loved it, plus they got to see and feel how different mediums worked. Plus they got to think about the parts of a plant

So there you have what we have been up to with our Botany fun! I am sorry for the sideways pictures! I have been trying and trying to fix this, but I am new to Word press and cant figure it out! I am going to link up over at Montessori Monday, so be sure to stop by there for more amazing Montessori fun! I will be back tomorrow with lots more fun! Happy Schooling!!!

May 1, 2013

Botany~ Root Week

Stephanie Botany, Nature Walk 1 Comment

Today we were able to get some work done on our botany unit. We were stopped last week by all the spring cleaning, so we never got to the roots. So this week we are exploring how they work, what they do, and what they are sensitive to! We started by talking about the parts of a root and what they do. Usually we use the Montessori botany charts, today I used the plants that we have been growing to illustrate the parts and the jobs of the roots! We were able to see the long roots of the tomato plants, the root hairs and the the root tip. We also could see how the roots in the clear cups started to grow toward the outside, but then turned to go back into the dirt. This allowed us to talk about how roots don’t like the light and will go back toward the dark because the dark is where the water is! Then we went to park to a small pond to see how the roots grow toward the water. I was excited to go because I knew that they would be able to see the roots going right into the pond. It was better then a chart because it was for real! The girls were really interested in seeing the roots all over. We walked along some as far as we could see them and Bunny was impressed by how far they went. It was a great way to explore and discover together!

Exploring how roots grow in all directions

These are the roots of our tomato plants. Think its time to transplant? 🙂

This was a tiny plant that we needed to pull because there was another one in the pot. So we talked about how hard it was to pull out of the soil and how roots are there to hold the plant in the ground by forming a network of roots.

Just because they are cute.

Roots along the water that turn and head into the water.

We also got to see some pretty spring wildflowers that were growing! I took some pictures using my new camera and they look so pretty! I wanted to shoe you, even though they don’t have much to do with the root study! 🙂

And this crazy girl is so silly!

We had a great time and I am hoping that Bunny will draw some of what we talked about today and write a little bit. I love it when we are able to use real things to explore how things work! It is the beauty of learning and I wouldn’t trade these discovery days for anything!

April 12, 2013

Botany~ Leaf Week

Stephanie Botany, Homeschooling, Montessori Work Day 2 Comments

This has been a rather interesting week full of fun and friends, but not as much work. However, we did get some fun botany in this week (along with some other things)! We were talking about the parts of a leaf, what a leaf does for the plant, and about a few of the different types of leaves. We didnt get everything in that I wanted to, but we did do some of it! Bunny told me that she thinks she is learning to love school work again, so we must have done something right! 😉 Here is some of the things we did in Botany.

We explored the parts of a leaf by using a real plant! Since spring had decided to hide again and there is not much growing, I was very thankful for the plants that I did have in my house! It turned out perfect for looking at the parts of a leaf!

Pup and I did the parts of the leaf with the Montessori Botany Puzzle and with the traditional 3 part cards. She was mildly interested, but had other work that she needed to get back to.

Bunny and I went deeper. She found the parts on the plant. We then talked about how the plant makes its own food. I used a combination of presentations. I like how my albums talked about it simply with the chart. However, the Waseca Biome Study really described the way the molecules work together and how the leaf puts out oxygen. The Waseca Study explains how to demonstrate this using a group of kids, I used buttons instead. When I explained it that way, Bunny had an Aha moment! We used the buttons on a leaf and moved them around showing how the leaf takes in carbon dioxide and water. Then we see how the sunlight breaks the water molecule apart and and the hydrogen molecules hook up to the carbon dioxide! Then it is easy to see how the oxygen is free to go out into the air. The Botany chart I made illustrated that and Bunny loved it!

We also talked about the stomata that allow the gases to come in and out of the leaf. We were not able to see them on out plants without a microscope. However, we did an experiment where we put some fresh leaves in water and left it in the sun for a couple of hours. The time allowed the oxygen in the leaves to come out and form bubbles on and around the leaves! Bunny was amazed! I had forgotten about it and Bunny ran it to me and was SO excited to show me the bubbles!

Finally, we also finished up some of our other experiments from last week. Our seed experiment about the needs of plants work out pretty well (i may have accidentally let then dry out over the weekend). We did see that they all sprouted except the one with no water. Then we noticed that only the one with everything started to grow a little bit. It had the small leaves starting.

Here is Bunny’s report on the experiment!

We also measured the seedlings again! They are exploding! I really dont know what I am going to do with them! I am defiantly going to need to transplant them. Unfortunately it will at least be a few more weeks before I can plant them outside. By then I will have zucchini all over the house! We will see what happens! They grew about an inch in a week!

Another thing that Bunny is doing alot of is copy work! I have taken the three part cards from Karen Tyler’s Course and photo copied then next to line paper. I then wrote out definitions for each part of the leaf, plant, flower, root, and stem. Bunny then takes blank one and copies the words and colors the picture. Pretty simple, but she is really loving it! It is a really great way for her to start practicing her handwriting and getting those letter going the right way!

Here is Bunny’s

Here is Mine. She did a pretty good job didnt she!

Hers above, mine below!

She has done a couple of the parts of a leaf. I included the ones she hasnt done yet too so you can see the definitions in case you want them!

So there you have our Botany for the week! I didnt get time to go into different shapes of leaves yet, but we will soon. Plus I wanted to take a leaf walk, but the rain and cold has made it really hard to get out. Maybe tomorrow! I hope you have had a good school week too! If you have a favorite botany idea, share it in the comments! Happy Schooling everyone!