I have such a lot of posts from last year to get up on my blog! Taking six months off suddenly doesn’t seem like such a hot idea. Anyhoo, here is our lesson on seeds, using the Apologia text book.
Checking Out Different Seeds
I read the chapter to the girls, who then got to study different seeds close up:
They drew one, labelled it and made some notes:
Growing Seeds
The girls grew their own beans in some water absorbing gel:
Studying them as the days went by:
And plotting their growth on the graphs provided:
Dissecting a Seed
I gave the girls a sharp knife, a bean seed and magnifying glass and asked them to find and then label each part on the diagram in their notebooks:
Growing Vegetables and Herbs From Scratch
We checked on our herb garden which was looking particularly healthy:
As well as checking on the progress of our salad and vegetable garden:
Which were all coming along very nicely in deed:
The girls even picked some salad to eat for lunch:
Learning About Monocots and Dicots
We read about made a plant either a monocotyledon or a dicotyledon and went looking for some leaf and flower evidence:
Taking photos as we went along:
The girls drew some examples of the flowers they had collected:
Collecting Seeds
Granny next door has a very developed wild flower garden which she has nurtured for many years. She invited the girls to go over and collect some seeds. They popped them in an envelope and stuck them in their notebook:
Designing coats for their seeds
They designed their own seed coat (of arms!):
Cute, uh?
Testing for Carbohydrate
After learning that endosperms are mainly made up of carbohydrate, the girls had some fun choosing lots of different foods to test for carbohydrate using iodine solution:
We simply placed the food stuffs, plus an actual endosperm (for a control positive) onto a plastic sleeve and poured a couple of drops of iodine on each sample:
If the brown iodine turned black then this indicated the presence of carbohydrate:
Interesting stuff:
Our Seeds Notebook Pages
Completed over a year ago, but I thought it might be helpful for anyone looking for ideas if they too were learning about seeds. Enjoy!