Planting Seeds (and a Winner!)

I will not lie to you friends, this week was HARD! We had 3 days of rain (ie inside recess) AND our Music teacher was out for 3 days so planning time got cut to 20 minutes. I don't know if its the pregnancy thing or what, but one 20 minute break from 8:30-4:00 just isn't enough any more!

Luckily, we had some good times with our Plant Life Cycle unit. I love teaching this unit since we most of my kiddos have very little experience with growing things. Most live in apartments or a trailer park, so gardening is not an activity they usually take part in. We started our unit by reading two books:

I love how well these two go together - and the personification of the seeds in The Tiny Seed makes reading the book aloud so much fun - the kids gasp and call out and there are many choruses of "Aww!" when a seed "dies".

Once we read the books, I showed the kids our little greenhouse and some seed packs I had purchased. The greenhouse has 36 peat pods, so I figured we'd plant use 12 each for 3 different seeds. Here's what it looks like:

We had a choice of 6 different seeds, so we did some quick internet research on each, then we voted. I don't know about your class, but in mine the kids always tend to vote together - so if little Johnny chooses Turnip all of his little buddies do the same, and the same with little Mary and her friends. It drives me up the wall for some reason (I want them all to be leaders, not followers - even in the instance of choosing seeds lol!). So, this time I turned our board around and called them behind it one-by-one for secret voting.

Surprisingly, most of the boys ended up picking the Forget-me-nots - I had totally thought they would go for the cantaloupe or turnips, but maybe they envision taking a flowering plant home to mama (after the seeds sprout we will be transplanting them to individual pots to take home).

Then it was time to plant our cantaloupes, turnips and forget-me-nots. The neatest thing was the difference in seed sizes:

 
Here are a few pics of little hands taking turns being gardeners (disclaimer, I do not garden much myself, so I just have them plant 3 seeds in each pod and cross my fingers that we get enough to sprout so that everyone has a plant to put in a pot later! Maggie from Maggie's Kinder Corner told me a great idea - plant  flower seeds, then go to your local nursery and purchase enough plants to replace the seedlings with - that way you can swap them out one Friday afternoon and the kids will be wowed on Monday to see how much their flowers have grown! This would be a perfect Mother's Day gift too!)

After planting we made predictions on which type of seeds would sprout first. We read each package to see the germination time table and then tried to make educated guesses from there. This was a tricky one for my kiddos - only 2 were able to really ignore which seed they had personally chosen and make a true prediction based on the germination info - the rest just chose the kind of seed they wanted to grow the most lol!

Once each pod had been planted, we replaced the cover and set it on our windowsill in the sun:

I absolutely love my windowsill - I try to keep green plants on it year round, along with our aquarium and crabitat!

Now that our seeds are planted, we can get to work on all the goodies in my new Plant Life Cycle pack! It has a labeling page, observation journal, KWL charts, life cycle pages, an easy reader and more! You can win a copy for your class by Rustling Up a Comment below! Just tell me what kind of seeds you plant in your classroom :)

And, the winner of the Chicken Life cycle pack was #8, Erin! Your pack is being emailed right now Erin, thanks for your comment!