Seeds, Seeds, Seeds!

Happy Friday!

I found some really great seed books to introduce my Firsties to our study on seeds.  Here's a few we read:

                                       

Clockwise from top: 

Oh Say Can You Seed by Bonnie Worth

A Seed is Sleepy by Dianna Aston

Seeds and More Seeds by Millicent Ellis Selsam

Seed to Plant (non fiction text) - Kristin Baird Rattini

From Seed to Plant by Gail Gibbons
 Exploring Seeds (non fiction text) by Kristin Sterling

This week during centers, I displayed all the types of seeds we were going to be planting.  I asked the students to choose two types of seeds each.  Then I recorded the seeds they chose (you can never have too many backup copies of things!) and had the students write their name and each type of seed they chose on a Popsicle stick.  Here's a few photos of some Firsties in action:

    

They loved getting to consider each type of plant and seed, have a look at the seeds, and choose which ones they wanted to plant.  In addition to the carrots and celery already growing in our garden, we decided to plant broccoli, lettuce, radish, pumpkin, peas, green beans and sunflower seeds.  A few students also chose to plant more carrot seeds.  I collected the Popsicle sticks and we'll be using them to mark where the seeds have been sown when we go out into the garden to plant next week!

In addition to the wonderful fiction and non fiction books we've been reading this week, I also found a great (and FREE!) seed resource on Teachers Pay Teachers.  First I brought in some lima beans and let the students investigate them and see if they noticed that the beans had parts.  Then we discussed the different parts, and I made an anchor chart to serve as a reference.  Then the students worked to label the parts of the bean independently.  Here's the link to the FREE parts of a lima bean by Teachers Pay Teachers creator Living the Grade Life if you want to try it yourself!