Planting Seeds With Melissa

The exploration of art and nature leads us in so many varied directions of learning. Today we had the opportunity to explore nature through planting. Hayden's mom, Melissa joined our class to share her love, passion and experience of plant life. Melissa planned an incredible morning where the children were able to gain first hand knowledge from a professional botanist so much knowledge about plants. " We are going to investigate plants, baby plants and big plants and look at different ways that plants grow", were Melissa's opening words to the children .

One activity that the children participated in was matching baby plants to a photo of the adult plant. This required looking intentionally at details of the plants; leaves, shape, and color were a few of the attributes that distinguished one plant from another. This was wonderful opportunity for the children to practice visual discrimination skills.

In five small groups, the children planted a variety of seeds that will grow into edible plants. Melissa's idea is to have the children plant them today and then she will take them back to her greenhouse at her garden center where they will germinate. Melissa invited our class to go on a field trip to her garden center in a few weeks to transplant the small plants into larger containers where full growth will occur. The final stage of this exploration is to bring the plants back to school in larger pots for us to experience the process of growing our own vegetables. We hope that the vegetables will be ready to be harvested in late May and we will all be able to enjoy them in a shared lunch. We planted carrots, peas, parsley, lettuce and spinach and we are looking forward and extremely excited about having our very own vegetable garden! Please make time to engage in a conversation with your child about this experience. They have SO much knowledge to share!

Melissa then introduced us to a beautiful spider plant she brought in and invited each child to take one of the spider's off-shoots to plant in their own individual containers to keep and care for.

The children are becoming more aware of what plants need to grow and how the roots are the life support to the plants. Planting the spider babies and caring for our own plants reinforce these concepts.

We ended our planting session with a circle conversation which included a discussion of where the vegetables grow; above the soil or below. Melissa drew each vegetable that we planted on our white board and the children were able to see the relationship and make the connection of above and below ground.

Building connections between home and school is and continues to be an integral part of our program. We thank Melissa for her time, energy, expertise and support of our curriculum.