Some resources for studying seeds with young children

A cool book we read is A Seed Is Sleepy by Dianna Hutts Aston. Great illustrations, gentle text. Not a scientific treatise, but a chance to awaken interest in the diversity of the seed world.

Last night I was feeling guilt pains over my lack of worksheets about seeds. Options:

1. Make my own.
2. Find something on Enchanted Learning (and they do have some nice ones there).
3. Look for some cool Montessori-type stuff instead.

And the winner is -- seed nomenclature cards from Montessori for Everyone.



Really, you could make these yourself easily. But since I was already wishing I'd thought of this a week ago, I chose to order the PDF. The file arrived within the hour, I printed them on cardstock (if I were expecting heavy use I'd also laminate them). AnnaBeth spent some time matching things up. We didn't exactly do a 3-part lessons (surely you don't expect us to be Montessori purists here -- and anyway, this stuff is actually for the 3-6 year old classroom).

My long-range plan is to re-visit these, mixing them in with, say, parts of the stem or parts of the leaf -- in other words, becoming more difficult. Also, she'll draw and label a seed.

I found this in one of my Montessori catalogues last night. You know what? I have gobs of glass jars around here. I also have carrot and radish seeds. All I'm lacking is a way to shield the roots from light (I think the kit comes with black paper you use as a light shield). But guess what -- I have loads of black felt; I considered sewing velcro on to wrap it around the jars, but may go lower tech with duct tape. We'll just have to figure out how close to the side to plant the seeds.