Practical Botany in October

It's easiest for me to write up my notes in pieces, updating as we go along. Here, if you missed it, is my topic overview post: Notes on Practical Botany.

Now, on to the plants!

Milkweed

Common Milkweed (Asclepias syriaca)
Swamp Milkweed (Asclepias incarnata)

read Monarch and Milkweed by Helen Frost

look at dried milkweed pods & milkweed seeds

make Abstract Textile Seedpods from Making Zen workshop

nature sketch

add to MLB under Botany Basics (Seed Dispersal)




for more on Seed Dispersal

Seeds Move! by Robin Page

Bur Oak

Bur Oak (Quercus macrocarpa)

field trip to Superblock to pick up bur oak acorns & acorn caps

nature sketch

add to MLB under Tree Identification
note: oak wood is traditionally used in barrel making aka cooperage

The Mighty Bur Oak: Sentinel Tree of the Prairie Peninsula
Agricultural Electronic Bulletin Board, University of Missouri Extension

Another Gift from Oaks
International Oak Society

Judean Date Palm

Date Palm (Phoenix dactylifera)

read A Seed Is Sleepy by Dianna Hutts Aston

read The Miracle Seed by Martin Lemelman

open a fresh date to find its seed

nature sketch

add to MLB under Botany Basics (Germination)



Six New Ancient Date Trees
The Arava Institute for Environmental Studies


for more on Germination

Morning Glories by Sylvia Johnson (pp.14-15, 36-41)
available FREE at Internet Archive



terminology:
cotyledon, monocot, dicot, seed coat, embryo, endosperm

Osage Orange

Osage Orange (Maclura pomifera)

look at osage orange fruit and thorny branches

learn interesting facts about this tree - three links below

learn the term "dioecious" and cut open a fruit to see if the female tree it came from was pollinated (does it contain seeds?)

experiment with using osage orange as a natural dye

nature sketch

add to MLB under Tree Identification

note: due to its nasty spines, osage orange was widely planted as fencing to define property lines until the introduction of barbed wire (thus the name "hedge-apple")

Pruning the Osage Orange Trees
Martha Stewart

Natural Dyes - Harvesting Osage Orange
Folk Fibers

Osage Oranges in Peñasquitos Canyon
Friends of Los Peñasquitos Canyon Preserve

Persimmon

American Persimmon (Diospyros virginiana)

look at persimmon tree, leaf, fruit, and seeds

recipe?
here is my 2024 post of Persimmon Recipes

nature sketch

add to MLB under Special Plants - Edible

How Do Persimmons Breed?
Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center

Flower Dissection with Emily
Lowell Land Trust

terminology:
perfect flower, monoecious, dioecious

Chestnut

Chinese Chestnut (Castanea mollissima)
American Chestnut (Castanea dentata)
European Chestnut (Castanea sativa)
Horse Chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum)

look at Chinese chestnut burr and nuts

recipe?
here is my 2023 post of Chestnut Recipes

look at European Chestnut and Horse Chestnut trees in Match a Leaf

look at Chestnut illustration in Tree Bingo

check fact booklet - what kind of chestnut is it?

scientific names matter because they prevent confusion!

nature sketch

add to MLB under Botany Basics (Scientific Name)


horse chestnuts are extremely poisonous and MUST NOT be confused with Chinese chestnuts; note that they share the first part of their scientific name with the also-poisonous red buckeye (Aesculus pavia)

sketch Chinese/American chestnut leaves (edible nut) compared to horse chestnut/red buckeye leaves (poisonous nut)

add to MLB under Botany Basics (Simple vs. Compound Leaves)


Match a Leaf: A Tree Memory Game

Cattail

Common Cattail (Typha latifolia)

look at cattails

read From Seed to Cattail by Lisa Owings

put students in pairs, and have them use the index of foraging books to find and share facts about foraging cattails

Field Guide to Edible Wild Plants by Bradford Angier

Midwest Foraging: 115 Wild and Flavorful Edibles from Burdock to Wild Peach by Lisa M. Rose

Stalking the Wild Asparagus by Euell Gibbons

nature sketch

add to MLB under Special Plants - Edible

Black Tupelo

Tupelo (Nyssa sylvatica)

look at tupelo tree, leaf, and fruit

photosynthesis lesson (C₆H₁₂O₆)

discuss Photosynthesis Shutdown: The Chemical Process Behind Fall Color Emergence

Let Sleeping Trees Lie
American Forest Management

When Trees Wake Up
American Forest Management

nature sketch

add to MLB under Botany Basics - Photosynthesis

Nyssa sylvatica
North Carolina Extension Gardener Plant Toolbox

terminology:
photosynthesis, chlorophyll, chloroplast, stomata, glucose, bud break

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Notes on Practical Botany

We are beginning our study of Botany! In Waldorf, this is a major grade 5 topic. I have a LOT of resources in my stash already, which can be really overwhelming. So I've decided to just think about one plant at a time.

Since we are focusing -- if at all possible -- on plants that are located near us and doing something interesting at the present moment, I'm going to organize these notes by month. (I'm in the temperate forest in the Northern Hemisphere, so it's early Autumn right now.) We have two Botany MLBs which we will keep out and available all year, in case a plant near us unexpectedly starts doing something interesting. They are tricky that way!

Our two MLBs are divided into two parts each, so four chapters in all:

MLB #1

Botany Basics

Tree Identification

MLB #2

Special Plants - Medicinal

Special Plants - Edible

I even got different MLBs (one with onion skin and one without... both green of course) so that it's easier for the children to tell them apart while we are adding in our information. I'm excited to see how the books come together!

Many thanks to Ms. Megan for the Botany books she's lending us this year:

Field Guide to Edible Wild Plants
by Bradford Angier

The Lost Book of Herbal Remedies: The Healing Power of Plant Medicine
by Nicole Apelian & Claude Davis

Manual of Woody Landscape Plants: Their Identification, Ornamental Characteristics, Culture, Propogation and Uses
by Micahel Dirr

Midwest Foraging: 115 Wild and Flavorful Edibles from Burdock to Wild Peach
by Lisa M. Rose

Special Forces Survival Guide: Wilderness Survival Skills from the World's Most Elite Military Units
by Chris McNab

Stalking the Wild Asparagus
by Euell Gibbons

A Weaver's Garden: Growing Plants for Natural Dyes and Fibers
by Rita Buchanan

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

Factor Trees Are Confusing My Child

A special blog post for parents whose children find the process of creating factor trees to be completely opaque. You could also introduce this technique to a class before moving them on to factor trees. This is from Jamie York!

Without exception, I would recommend Jamie York's excellent book for Middle School Math.

Making Math Meaningful:
A Middle School Math Curriculum for Teachers and Parents

The process Jamie recommends requires rewriting the number multiple times, so just know that it will likely take your child one sheet of paper for each prime factorization problem. Let's take 270,000 as our example.

270,000

300 ⋅ 900

2 ⋅ 150 ⋅ 900

2 ⋅ 50 ⋅ 3 ⋅ 900

Get the idea?

It is a lot of rewriting, but the children can easily see that all of these rows will still multiply together to equal 270,000, which they CANNOT see with a factor tree. You just keep going until the whole thing is prime numbers.

2 ⋅ 25 ⋅ 2 ⋅ 3 ⋅ 900

2 ⋅ 5 ⋅ 5 ⋅ 2 ⋅ 3 ⋅ 900

2 ⋅ 5 ⋅ 5 ⋅ 2 ⋅ 3 ⋅ 3 ⋅ 300

2 ⋅ 5 ⋅ 5 ⋅ 2 ⋅ 3 ⋅ 3 ⋅ 2 ⋅ 150

While it may be tempting for us as adults to start to put the prime factors in order from smallest to largest, don't have a child do that. They need to get an idea of where these numbers are coming from! Plus, you want to be able to go back and check their work if they get the wrong answer at the end.

2 ⋅ 5 ⋅ 5 ⋅ 2 ⋅ 3 ⋅ 3 ⋅ 2 ⋅ 6 ⋅ 25

2 ⋅ 5 ⋅ 5 ⋅ 2 ⋅ 3 ⋅ 3 ⋅ 2 ⋅ 2 ⋅ 3 ⋅ 25

2 ⋅ 5 ⋅ 5 ⋅ 2 ⋅ 3 ⋅ 3 ⋅ 2 ⋅ 2 ⋅ 3 ⋅ 5 ⋅ 5

2⁴ ⋅ 3³ ⋅ 5⁴

When you are ready for factor trees, I love

You Can Count on Monsters: The First 100 Numbers and Their Characters
by Richard Evan Schwartz

See my past blog post on how to draw these "Monstrously" Cool Factor Trees

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

John Cage - Oh, How We Love You

This year I'm teaching an Art Club for 5 & 6 year old children.

I absolutely love John Cage...

and so I chose him as the focus of our first two Art Club sessions!

Beautiful Noise: The Music of John Cage
by Lisa Jean Rogers

In the past, we've often learned about John Cage in Philosophy:

Is It Music?
Jan 1, 2024

What Is Music?
Oct 12, 2016

My favorite quote ever from doing that lesson with children:
"That music lacked music."

If you're unfamiliar with 4'33" here is an NPR article:

The Story Of '4'33"'
https://www.npr.org/2000/05/08/1073885/4-33

A quote from this article:

For the second, the provisionally entitled "Four Pieces," Tudor starts a stopwatch, sits down in front of the piano, closes the lid and begins a performance in which he never plays a note.

After 30 seconds of silence, Tudor resets the stopwatch and times another two minutes, 23 seconds of silence, then another one minute, 40 seconds of silence. But is it silence? ....

The silent composition, which became known by its duration of four minutes and 33 seconds, was influenced by Cage's encounter with the so-called "white paintings" by his friend Robert Rauschenberg — huge canvasses of undifferentiated white whose surfaces vary infinitely with particles of dust and light reflections.

Nothing: John Cage and 4'33"
by Nicholas Day

John Cage was in the news during COVID:

A 639-Year Concert, With No Intermission for Coronavirus
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/07/arts/music/john-cage-as-slow-as-possible-germany.html

The long, slow performance of a piece by the American composer John Cage is scheduled to run until 2640. On Saturday, an audience in Germany heard a sound change — the first since 2013.

John Cage has come up in our Art History studies of Sister Mary Corita Kent, Yves Klein, and Yoko Ono. His book with Lois Long, Mud Book: How to Make Pies and Cakes, is also featured in my list of Books in ALL CAPS.

Mud Book: How to Make Pies and Cakes
by John Cage & Lois Long

We will also probably spend some time on John Cage when we do Inventors and the Slinky! In 1959, John Cage composed an avant garde work called "Sounds of Venice" scored for (among other things) a piano, a slab of marble and Venetian broom, a birdcage of canaries, and an amplified Slinky.

But on to my notes from Art Club:

Fri Sep 25 - introduction to mark making / graphic notation

read Beautiful Noise: The Music of John Cage by Lisa Jean Rogers

pass out large sheets of paper and colored pencils

make sounds and have the children create marks which go with them (shake water bottle, stamp feet, tap pencil, sweep broom)

look at examples of birdsongs in graphic notation

have each person sing one of the birdsongs
can we figure out which one they're singing?

have each person sing a wordless song of their choice
while we draw the colors & marks that go with their voice

set out a selection of musical instruments

demonstrate the sound made by each

have each person draw a set of colorful marks
then choose instruments and perform their "piece"

take a Nature walk and listen for birdsongs



this page is from a vintage children's encyclopedia

Fri Oct 2 - tactile exploration / sensory play

read Nothing: John Cage and 4'33" by Nicholas Day

sit on a yoga mat in silence for 4 minutes and 33 seconds
what did you hear?

add drops of food coloring to water and watch it swirl around

read Mud Book: How to Make Pies and Cakes by John Cage

go outside to the mud kitchen to mix up recipes!
to the mud we added our colored water and some seashells

I did a whole blog post on Fun Things We Add to the Mud Kitchen. I find that colored water is such a simple addition and a surprisingly big hit with kids!

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

Botany: Art & Handwork Ideas

It's Making Zen right now and I'm having a great time. I also remembered that there have been several projects over the past 3 years (6 Making Zen conferences) that I mentally tagged as being good possibilities for Botany.

And now we are beginning Botany!

I'm just going to make myself a master list of Art & Handwork Ideas. Feel free to add to it if you found a great online tutorial, or a lesson in a book.

Speaking of books... Drawing from the Book of Nature is KEY for this block. I'll have to make another post listing all of the Botany chapters.

workshops from Making Zen

Amy Maricle

Fine Line Flowers
Oct 2025

watercolor paints: indigo, rose madder, lemon yellow




Mini Watercolor Leaves: Beautiful Botanicals Made Simple
Sep 2026
inspired by Broadhead Arrowleaf

cold press watercolor paper

watercolor paints: indigo, lemon yellow, olive green

Darcy Hunter

Hand-Stitched Red Poppies with 3D Elements
Oct 2025




Painting Fabric with Watercolour and Inktense
Sep 2026

Kristin Peterson

Abstract Textile Seedpods
Sep 2026

inspired by Milkweed

Lisa Goddard

Mixed Media Textile Moth
May 2024

POLLEN: Darwin's 130-Year Prediction by Darcy Pattison

other workshops, tutorials & ideas

Wet Felted Flower
YouTube - Spry Whimsy Fiber Arts

Wet Felted Trumpet Flower
YouTube - Esther's Place


Sycamore Keys
YouTube - Marion's World
embroidery pattern available as a FREE download

here are 11 Trees with Helicopter Seeds (Samara Fruit)

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

Geodesic Dome... Conquered!

HOORAY!

First of all, color coding is key.

For our dome project (see my previous post on Buckminster Fuller and Geodesic Domes), we used

25 yellow + 5 orange straws (cut to 17.5 inches in length)

35 pink straws

The 5 orange straws are the star at the top of the dome. This helps keep everyone on your team oriented spatially as you assemble the structure.

We also used

40 green paperclips
(to make ten 4-way connectors)

30 yellow paperclips
(to make six 5-way connectors)

60 white paperclips
(to make ten 6-way connectors)

These jumbo 20 inch long straws are awesome, and having all the different colors really helps!!!

STEPS IN ASSEMBLY

1. Lay out straws by color. Cut the yellow and orange straws to 17.5 inches.

2. Lay out paper clips by color. Make 4-way, 5-way, and 6-way connectors.

Use the yellow paper clips to make the 5-way connectors
(these are for the centers of the orange and yellow stars)

Use the green paper clips to make the 4-way connectors
(these are for the base; they go into the "feet" of the yellow stars)

Use half of the white paper clips to make five 6-way connectors
(these are for the top points of the yellow stars)

Use the remaining white paper clips to make ten 3-way connectors
(these are for the "hands" of the yellow stars and will join together to become 6-way connectors upon assembly of the dome)

3. Make the orange star (which is the top of the dome). Set it aside.

4. Make a yellow five point star.

5. Add the following connectors to the open ends of your yellow star

4-way connectors at the feet of the star (left and right)

3-way connectors (1/2 of six) at the arms of the star (left and right)

6-way connector on the top point of star
note: this connector will go into the orange star "cap" at the end

5. Insert the pink straws into the connectors all the way around your star to form a pentagon panel. These panels are the sides of your dome.

6. Make 4 more yellow stars / pentagons in this way. You will have five in all.

6. Assemble your pentagon panels into a circle, with the left and right arms touching. The white 3-way connectors there will need to be linked together to form a 6-way connector. At the base and at the top of the space between the panels you will place a pink straw. It will look like an hourglass shape.

On the floor, all the way around the base of the dome, you will see green connectors and pink straws.

The first row of triangles above the base will alternate between having yellow sides and having pink sides.

There will be five pentagon panels that make up the circular walls of the dome. One pentagon panel will be the cap on top.

yellow stars, highlighted

the orange star proudly takes its place at the top of the dome

In my experience, it takes A LOT of people to help hold each panel in place while the pink straws are being put in between them.

The design will be very floppy and it can be quite frustrating... until the cap is placed on top, at which point it will snap into place and become rigid and very strong. Buckminster Fuller came up with an amazing building!

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