Seeds & Plants Unit

Seeds & Plants Unit 

This year we are lucky enough to be part of a homeschooling co-op. This is fantastic news for me because my older children are getting the opportunity to learn from other adults and build friendship with like minded families and children. Selfishly , it also relives me from teaching Jr.High science !
In return , I am teaching unit studies to a group of children between Gr.1-3.
Unit studies are such a great way to combine different subjects into one theme which hopefully makes learning much more interesting !
You can check out other posts to find units such as our; Bird Unit , Bees Unit,  Jack & the Beanstalk Unit. Mini- Beaver Unit, Humpty Dumpty Egg Unit Community Helpers Unit and Owl Unit.

Normally when I plan a unit study I make sure that I include components of writing, math, science and art. For this post I will show you some of the hands on activities I had them do along side their reading and written work.

Variety to explore

On our first day I let the children use plastic knives to cut into a variety of fruits and vegetables. They learned that seeds come in different sizes and in varying amounts.
How many plants could they grow from the seeds of just one fruit? How many fruits would just one plant grow?
We ordered the seeds from smallest to largest and compared the number of seeds found in the fruits.

Planting

 On our next day our hands on activity was to learn what plants need in order to grow and to pot a plant.

For the books

After our activity we  made a page for our notebook with the information we learned. 

Identifying the parts we eat  

 On the last day of our unit study I bought a variety of plants. I tried to include as much of the full plant that I could so that they children could see which part they usually eat. We were also able to talk about how we could make use of more of the plant so we were not being wasteful.

nuts, grains and herbs are parts of plants we eat too !

A basic illustration to show parts of the plant