We’ve been learning all we can about plants these days and it’s been two months of planting-fun!

I’ve been making trips to the library to find books that would answer all our questions about plants. Our National Library is indeed a wonderful one-stop resource centre with plenty of materials for teaching preschoolers. Besides reading the reference books aloud, I also told the kids the story of The Tiny Seed by Eric Carle, a beautiful tale about a flowering plant’s life cycle through the seasons.

I also did a comprehension text with Ben and Becks using a text with an accompanying activity from this book which I found at the recent Popular Expo Sale (yes, yes, I frequent this place A LOT to get things cheap!):

This text is about leaves and their usefulness:

After reading the text together, I got Ben to read aloud each statement from the worksheet and circle the correct answer, and while he’s reading out loud, Becks would slap the answer with her flyswatter on her Yes-No board. It was fun for her, and she got to learn the sight words “yes” and “no”.

And then it was sight words and spelling time! We also picked up on the concept of singular-plural in English and that we don’t just always add an ‘s’ to every word to make the singular form plural, like in leaf and leaves.

We also touched and felt the leaves we eat (the vegetables in our fridge!), and the kids got to draw and colour their favourite. We also revised the parts of a flowering plant using one of our Age 4 worksheets from our Hands On Homeschooling curriculum:

Last month we were at Port of Lost Wonder and there was a mini gardening activity station there which allowed us to plant our little potted plant and take it home. We took home three and the kids have been faithfully watering them ever since. I also managed to buy a pot of flowering plant from Ikea and my little gardeners are helping me tend to it.

On one of the days, we also got our baskets and headed downstairs for some leaf collecting.  I wanted the kids to observe the different shapes and sizes of leaves and describe them as we walked and picked. The sweepers in our estate would be mighty pleased to know we helped to do some cleaning up with our leaf-picking that afternoon!

The leaves were not picked just for fun – though it was fun – because we later used these leaves for our painting activity. I got the kids to ink the leaves with paint and then stamp them on drawing paper to create artwork to showcase the variety of leaves they picked.

Needless to say, they were very happy to be *finally* playing with paint (I have OCD, which you know, right?) and were mighty stoked to be using their hands and paintbrushes. The squealing and laughter was worth the cleaning up, and they now have masterpieces to brag about:

We’ll be visiting Oh Farms for a hydroponic farm tour during the March holidays, and that will pretty much wrap up the PLANTS theme for us. Can’t wait!