Friday, June 25, 2021

Botany Week V - Asparagus & Alliums, Grasses, Roses

Our look at Plant Families continues, and we are really reaping the benefits of having an Outdoor Classroom this year! We've spent some time doing Botany in 2017 and 2018, but are able to go into it much more deeply now.


My Blog Posts from Teaching This Topic as a Main Lesson in 2021


Monday, June 14

  • Fort Building: walk around the yard to see what trees were cut down by the workmen on Saturday, make repairs to and/or relocate forts as needed

  • Early Childhood: lots of free outdoor play, indoor play with the Ostheimer & Holztiger wooden animals and the Fagus wooden trucks

  • Nature: spot a female box turtle starting to cross the road, look at her up close then carefully take her to the other side

  • Science: review Kings Play Chess On Fine Grains of Sand (Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species) and look up the taxonomy for our own species, Homo sapiens

      Animals

      Vertebrates

      Mammals

      Primates

      Hominids

      Man - Homo

      Wise - sapiens

    the sapiens is to distinguish us from H. habilis, H. erectus, H. neanderthalensis, etc.

    explain that the taxonomy for plants takes into account several major divisions by asking questions such as

    do they have vascular tissue?
    do they have seeds?
    do they have flowers?

    and only once we get into flowering plants do we divide them into monocots or dicots (the Tree of Life Puzzle from Waseca Biomes is really helpful for seeing example of plants which separate off into other categories by answering "no" to those questions)

  • Botany: read "The Island Map" (Monocots vs. Dicots) from Shanleya's Quest by Thomas Elpel, nibble on mung bean sprouts (a perfect example of a dicot), find monocots (grasses) and dicots (dandelions) in the yard and look at their venation patterns

    discuss Asparagus and Amaryllidaceae families (both monocots)

    look at our asparagus and hyacinth plants

    look at examples of alliums (onions, garlic, shallots)

    make fermented garlic spray to repel chipmunks and rabbits from eating the plants in our garden beds

    dissect onions and draw them (who ever knew that seven onions -- one per child -- could result in so much happiness? they had a blast! and we saved the papery onion skins for drying projects)

    recall our conversation with Ms. Aimee last week about what features botanists look at to decide what goes in what plant family... it was surprising to the children that hyacinth bulbs look so much like the alliums yet this plant is in the Asparagus Family!

  • Indoor Play on a Hot Afternoon: Don't Tip the Waiter, Cuboro Standard Marble Maze, Grimm's Color Chart Rally Building Blocks (dominoes), Guess Who?, Battleship, snuggle with Archie and Chia


Tuesday, June 15

  • Early Childhood: dye six colors of Rainbow Oats (2 cups oats : 3 T colored water) for sensory play and as part of our look at the Grass Family (and, as it turns out, their horses really like to nibble on the rainbow oats!), dig in the mulch mountain, make a home for worms

  • Plant Care: finally plant our cucumbers! we strung heavy twine between two pallets to give the tendrils plenty of things to grip on to

  • Botany: read "The Grass Islands" from Shanleya's Quest by Thomas Elpel, look at grass flowers (happily, I hadn't recently mowed my lawn), consider how the grasslands are both a source of food and a place to hide for many animals, do grassland animal coloring pages from the Creature Camouflage Series by Mindware (the white-tailed deer fawn was a particular favorite, since we see them daily in the yard and the children are alwyas amazed by how well they blend in)

  • Lunch: read All In Just One Cookie by Susan Goodman at lunch (Grass Family plants in this book are Sugar Cane and Wheat)

  • Play: Pengoloo, Quixo, marble maze, walk and pet the dog


Wednesday, June 16

    Unscheduled Wednesday!

    celebrate a classmate's first-ever wiggly tooth!

    cut weeds in the vegetable garden and set up a "Greenery Store" for children who are working on decorating their forts

    wooden animals

    marble maze

    run through the sprinkler

    read The Popcorn Book by Tomie dePaola

    pop purple popcorn with our hot air popper

    Grass Family Feast! hot sweet corn (with butter, of course), freshly popped purple popcorn, baby corn, bamboo shoots, lemongrass

    make a paper model of a Grass using the instructions in Drawing from the Book of Nature by Dennis Klocek (pages 141 & 144)

    Cauldron Quest

    The Allowance Game


Thursday, June 17

  • Early Childhood: decorate new box forts with block beeswax crayons, sit inside them and chat on the phone, sensory play with the rainbow oats, Tangoes Junior, Go Away Monster, lots of free outdoor play!

  • Botany: review that grasses do not need to have colorful or fragrant flowers because they are wind pollinated, answer a question about whether there are any mammal pollinators besides bats (yes! Unusual Mammal Pollinators article from the U.S. Forest Service)

    do the Grass drawing lesson from Drawing from the Book of Nature (pages 140 & 142) using block beeswax crayons for the background (orange and brown) and a colored pencil for the grass (green)

    sketch grass flowers, look at a stalk of dried wheat, look at examples of other grains from the Grass Family (millet, barley, farro, rye, basmati rice, jasmine rice, arborio rice, wild rice, oatmeal, and teff [the world's smallest grain])

  • Structured Word Inquiry: write down word pairings that students have questions about in our editing meetings (eat / edible, pollen / pollinate) as we wonder why these words have these patterns

    every word has a story, and instead of calling unexpected spellings "bizarre" or "crazy" or "awful" we think of them as "cool" and "awesome" (and we go find out why they are the way they are!)

  • Lunch / History: look at Root Systems of Prairie Plants poster from the USDA, read Erosion: How Hugh Bennett Saved America’s Soil and Ended the Dust Bowl by Darcy Pattison, talk about the dust storms

  • Botany / Special Guest: we were thrilled to have Ms. Aimee come be a guest teacher for the Rose Family!

    read "Islands of Fruits and Roses" (Rose Family, Plum & Apple) from Shanleya's Quest by Thomas Elpel

    Ms. Aimee brought along a lot of interesting things to look at (like seeing the perimeter of the ovary within an apple)

    we enjoyed a delicious feast of Rose Family Foods (apple, cherry, strawberry, nectarine, blackberry, raspberry) and learned new terminology (drupes, stone fruits, aggregate fruits, drupelets, carpels, pomes, grafting, accessory fruits, superior and inferior ovaries) and Actinomorphic vs Zygnomorphic - What's the difference ...

  • Afternoon Relaxation Time: Handwork, Sudoku


Friday, June 18

  • School Meeting: discuss the black bear sighting in a nearby county and how to handle safety around wild animals in general

  • Nature: spot two fawns in our yard! everyone has been staying away from their Nooks because the fawns like to nap in them... as we are actually in their space and not the other way around, they take priority

  • Toilet Repair / Practical Life: help a student who couldn't figure out why the toilet wasn't working (I always keep the lids off the back of my toilets so that students can see how the insides work, and so that I can show them how to fix things as needed)

  • Botany: add Rose Family to MLB (since we ate all of the Rose Family foods yesterday, I gave them the Meadow Rose illustration from the Favorite Wildflowers Coloring Book by Ilil Arbel, page 21, to color and add to their MLB as the illustration)

  • Play: wooden memory game "Memos" by Guidecraft, wool felt play kitchen foods (I sewed all of these for Zac when he turned three), wooden tops, marble maze, Lincoln Logs, 100 pc Rainforest Floor Puzzle, Battleship, The Allowance Game, Don't Tip the Waitor

  • Wishlist for Future Blocks: children are starting to ask me to record their wishlist of future blocks as next year's schedule is already planned but they have so many things they'd like to learn about! they want me to repeat past blocks that they missed such as Fibers & Clothing, Local History & Geography (and state symbols for Illinois), and Great Inventors (one child really wants to learn about Samuel Morse and have us all learn Morse Code)

    it would be so fun one year to let each child choose a main lesson block he/she most wants to learn about, and have that be our school year plan! 9 months of the school year and 9 children!

    and then I could also choose a "secondary topic" for each month so that my teacher goals were met as well

  • Afternoon Quiet Time: Handwork, SSR (many children are trying to finish up Handwork projects and SSR books before we leave for Summer Break)


This post contains affiliate links to materials I truly use for homeschooling. Qualifying purchases provide me with revenue. Thank you for your support!

Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)