How Does my Garden Grow

With Spring in the air, we've been spending a lot of time outside exploring.  This week we've decided to spend some more time on plants, rocks, and dirt.

We read stories about fruits and vegetables, and the fun of growing plants.  We read Eating the Alphabet, identifying fruits and vegetables for every letter of the alphabet.  We read the Eric Carle books, The Tiny Seed and The Bird that Loved a Mountain.  Genevieve enjoyed the artwork in How to Grow a Friend.  We read as puppy Clifford learned about gardens and twisted our way through a vegetable patch. This was great exercise and inspired us to act out the part of a growing seed.  We learned about a bunch of different kinds of weeds in Weeds Find a Way.  Genevieve loves sunflowers so enjoyed Sunflower House.  I love the story of The Princess who Lost Her Hair and Genevieve is into princesses right now, so she was interested and asked questions.

We sorted seeds, trying to guess what they would grow into.  We counted out 5 of each and wrapped them in a damp paper towel to watch them sprout.  We explored the garden with our our magnifying glass to see what we could find in the dirt.  Genevieve took some of the rocks she found and sorted them by appearance.  We talked about how they could have been made and what some of them might be.  She also did an experiment to see if rocks float in water, because she thought that they all should.  We made lots of our own flower art - using a soda bottle as a stamp, decorating paper doilies, and dissecting flowers and using the petals in art.  We took some white flowers, trimmed their stems and put them in purple liquid watercolor to see the path water takes through the petals.  She decided she wanted to paint some of the other white flowers with tempera paint too.

We read some counting books like Skippy Jon Jones 123, Five Little Pumpkins, and The Very Hungry Caterpillar.  We practiced subtraction with Pete the Cat and His Four Groovy Buttons.  I was amazed at how well Genevieve did at finishing the patterns in National Geographic Patterns, but we had practiced patterns this week by using glitter glue to create color and shape patterns on her large Easter egg.

Genevieve found The Art Book for Children, which she has really enjoyed.  It's inspired her to make a bunch of pom-pom creations (Olaf, Elsa and a dinosaur).  She drew a self portrait, created some rainbow sand art and painted a princess as well.