Ways to explore plants through experiential learning and hands-on investigations in the classroom!
Our class had the opportunity to take a field trip to a beautiful greenhouse, compliments of one of our parents, and it was an eye opening experience to see what all is involved in caring for and nurturing such a massive amount of plant life. In lieu of our greenhouse trip, we made a mini-greenhouse in preschool…
Your students can also plant their own seeds outdoors!
Exploring Parts of a Plant
Before heading off on our field trip, I wanted to get the kids thinking and talking about plants. I brought a simple plant that I pulled out of one of my own planters at home and dropped it into a baggie with some water. As the children passed the plant around the circle, we talked about the leaf, stem, and roots…
One of our students knows all about greenhouses because his grandpa owns the greenhouse we went and visited. So while the children passed around the plant, I asked him to share with the class what a greenhouse is. His answer – “It is a big building where you grow plants.” With that insightful explanation, we were now ready to make our own greenhouses. In our case, we were going to grow a bean in our greenhouse…
Making a “Greenhouse”
To plant the bean, the children used the droppers to get their paper towels wet with water…
Then they folded up or rolled up the wet paper towel and placed it in the bottom of a baggie…
And finally, they counted out at least four beans and dropped them in the baggie on top of the wet paper towel then sealed the bag shut. By the way, I had soaked the beans in water overnight to give them a little head start on the sprouting process…
Once the children had their beans planted in their baggies, they were ready to make their greenhouses. Some of the children made their greenhouse first then planted their beans in a baggie. To make the greenhouse, the children didn’t do much because I prepared the cutout of the greenhouse ahead of time. Yes, I know – this part of the process was not that interesting, but I will go ahead and tell you all about it anyway and we can all pretend that this was the most exciting idea you could imagine…
Measuring Plant Growth
The children’s job was to take one of my paper rulers and add numbers along one side of the greenhouse. This is so we can keep track of the growth of our plant as it gets taller in our greenhouse…
Then they were to write their name on the greenhouse and had the option to decorate the remaining edges of their greenhouse with other drawings if they wished…
And the final step was to put it all together. The children taped their bean in a baggie inside the greenhouse…
Making Observations
And then we hung them up in our window to watch the beans grow…
We are only on day two of our mini-greenhouse planting and already we are starting to see a tiny bit of growth. The children noticed it right away…
Super excited to see whether or not our beans sprout up so we can talk about our measurements along the way!
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