Botany Unit: Trees and Leaves

Last week's activities. Sorry if I have to flood this post with pictures as I am short on words.

Botany Unit: Plant Life Cycle and Photosynthesis

PHOTOSYNTHESIS

To wrap up our Plant Study, we looked into the process of Photosynthesis.  We talked about the source of light, the water and the carbon dioxide that the plant needed to produce oxygen.

I printed a few worksheets from Education.com for him to work on.      

Here's a helpful animation about Photosynthesis.

LIFE CYCLE OF A PLANT

Another worksheet from Education.com, here ordering the stages of a plant's life.

               

 EXPERIMENT

To see how the fluids move inside the plant, we did a little experiment.  We put some stalks of celery into a glass of water containing a blue food coloring.

              

The results as of Day 1.  The leaves and the tip of the stalks have blue spots and the leaves turned into blue.  That's because the blue water has been transported around the plants :)  I love how visible the blue pigments are in the leaves!  (You can click the pictures for a much bigger image)

              

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Montessori Monday
TGIF Linky Party
Teach Beside Me
Preschool Corner
Spring Carnival

Tree Shapes Outdoor Activity (Worksheet and Printable)

Because of the wonderful weather, I decided to throw a Botany Unit for this month.  We've got plenty of trees around the estate, all with different shapes so I was thinking that we should jump-start our Botany lessons with Tree Shapes.

So I made him a learning material that would help us identify the tree shapes in our estate... and hopefully use it this weekend as we visit the park.  This is an activity sheet that is included in the printable material, Tree Shapes.  We've also brought along our green do-a-dot marker with our worksheet.

The Poinsettia

Another activity that deserves a post :)  I love Poinsettia and we got lots of them during the holidays.  I remember growing up in the Philippines, my Mom would buy plastic Poinsettia as decorations at home.  I have never seen a real  one not until last year when we moved here.  Then I discovered that I owned a 3-part card of Poinsettia so I purchased the plant so we can have a real subject.

All the while I thought that the red leaves were flowers!   

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Sorting leaves and leaf BINGO game

To make use of our leaf cards, I printed out two samples for each leaf shape so Mavi can practice sorting them out.  Again, this was challenging for him.

Botany Unit: Leaf Shapes

Mavi and I have been collecting leaves to use for our leaf/leaves study.  I purchased this Botany Cabinet Shapes cards from Montessori Print Shop to introduce the different leaf shapes.

Leaves in Watercolor

We made this simple artwork which involves a pastel color, liquid watercolors and watercolor paper.  

 

 

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The Colorful World of Fruits

This was inspired by this post from How We Montessori.

The printed materials were downloaded from At Home with Montessori.

 

This was one activity my son totally loved! What’s not in the picture was when we ate the other half of each fruit LOL.

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The Life Cycle of an Apple for Preschoolers

Here’s what we did last week, how apples came to be, and where did they come from.  We did lots of work on fruits last week due to the bad weather.

Flowers in Spring (Part Two)

It’s so difficult to write a post these days. (been busy with personal work).  Good thing I keep pictures so it’s for me to track back the activities we did on a specific day/week. 

Here’s the conclusion of our Flower Unit which we started a few weeks ago. 

We picked flowers and identify them.  We later on used them as paint brushes.  Read about it here.

Another thing we did was make flowers out of cupcake cases.  We used do-a-dot markers to color each cases then let them dry.

While for our flowers to dry up, Mavi painted the egg carton so we can use them as plant box.

We use pipe cleaners as stems and inserted some beads on it to add a more decors to our flowers.

 

The end product.  I realize that the cases were too big for our plant box, thus... it is no longer visible LOL.  He placed this in his bedroom window and admired it for a few days.

He worked on flower nomenclature cards and puzzle as well.

 

Practical Life

Using clamp and chopstick trainer to transfer rose petals.  

 

Outdoor

Now this is exactly the reason why I always procrastinate to write any updates... we spend my free time outdoors!    It was just so timely that during the time we did our flower unit, we were blessed with a wonderful weather!

  

  

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Flowers in Spring (Part One)

Flowers are blooming everywhere! My loves smelling daffodils, picking up dandelions and admiring cherry blossoms.  With his current interest, I pulled out a flower theme so I can make use of these interests.

Here’s a craft which was inspired by No Time For Flashcards.  The number corresponds to the number of petals in the flower.  Then he insisted on adding stems and leaves and grasses.

 

Then on sunny day, we explore the estate to pick up some flowers and identify some wildflowers as well.

 

Once at home, we identified each flowers and matched them to the ones in the books. (Books were borrowed from our library)

We also used some of the flowers as paint brushes for his artwork.

He managed to use the leaves as well :)

We such had a great time working with flowers!  Reminds me of myself wayyy back a long time ago... enjoying picking up flowers during summer with my friends as well. 

Happy Monday everyone!

 

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