Caring For Our Vegetable Plants

We decided to place our vegetable plant containers against the fence near the Kindergarten flower garden because we thought that this area would get a good amount of sun everyday. Luckily the hose reaches across the playground and the children can actively participate in the watering and care of the plants. We have ten containers of vegetables to care for; we planted two containers of each of the following vegetable plants: carrots, parsley, beans, spinach, lettuce. The transformation of the vegetable seeds that we planted a few weeks ago to recognizable plants is quite magical! The children had been engaged in the process of planting the seeds and now bringing the plants back to school to nurture would open the doors to many new and interesting learning experiences.

There are so many parts of our curriculum that this exploration supports in such a meaningful ways. On a daily basis, the children will be practicing observational skills, literacy skills, mathematical concepts, cooperation skills and scientific concepts. Recording information about the plants at the very early stages of growth seemed like a perfect place to begin our work in both mathematical concepts and observation skills. This was a perfect opportunity to introduce the concept and language associated with measurement. We first looked at the different plants and decided to take photographs of the individual containers to visually record what they looked like.

We realized that they will change and we wanted to be sure to remember what they looked like. At this point , we talked about other ways that we could record and measure the growth of the different vegetable plants. The children were excited to compare the different heights of the plants and we talked about ways that we could record that information. We decided to measure the plants and introduced the ruler. After we measured each plant , we place a red clothespin at the spot on the ruler. We decided that we would check our plants each week and record our observations. We briefly talked about ways that we could record this information and our team decided to introduce graphing over the next several weeks..