Some Plant Themed Ideas

Over the past couple of weeks we have been doing lots of plant-themed projects. Here are some of my favorites.

1. Silk Flowers in the Sensory Table

I filled our sensory table with potting soil, added some shovels and flowers pots, and let the children "plant" silk flowers.

2. Bottle Print Flowers

We used recycled plastic bottles to make flowers. Then we drew a little stem on each flower.

3. Sprouting Seeds

Each of the students put a seed in a ziplock bag with a damp paper towel. We hung the bags in the front window and watched them sprout!

 

4. Q-Tip Flowers

I had the children draw stems on a piece of construction paper. Then we used Q-tips to make tiny flowers at the top of each stem.

5. The Parts of a Plant

For this project, I cut out stems and leaves from green paper. I used pieces of brown pipe cleaner for the roots and real seeds for the seeds. I gave each child a set of plant parts and let them glue the parts onto a piece of paper. When they were finished, they drew a flower on their plant. As they worked, we talked about the names of all the different parts of the plant.

6. Gardening

You can always do some real gardening with children too. To read more about this, check out my post on gardening in preschool.

 

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Seed Mosaics

I found this idea for seed mosaics at teachpreschool.org.

The children filled small, round plastic lids with white glue.

 When their lid was full of glue, they placed a variety of bean seeds in it. 

 Next, we painted the seeds.

 The children realized that they could swirl the paint in the glue to make a pretty pattern. 

We set them on a tray to dry. The drying took about a week but when they were finally ready, we peeled them out of the trays and hung them up in the classroom. 

Planting Beans

We have been reading books about seeds and plants. Our favorite right now is Ten Seeds by Ruth Brown. The book shows how the seeds produce roots and then stems and leaves. Yesterday wwe planted our own bean seeds in plastic bags. This way when the roots and stems appear we will be able to see them.

We started with a paper towel and a bean seeds. 

The children sprayed their paper towels with water until they were pretty wet. 

 We had a little bit of trouble aiming the spray bottle at the towel. Every few moments I would be misted with water or hear one of the children exclaim,"Hey! You're spraying me!" 

Once the paper towel was wet, each child folded (or rolled) the paper towel around the seed and placed it in a ziplock bag. 

We hung the seeds in the window and are waiting for nature to do its work.