Concept Week #2: Gardening

As an expansion on the Food Pyramid and healthy eating we did gardening for our second Concept Week.  Optimus Prime & Bumblebee had already grown seeds inside a couple of different Friday's for their Arts & Crafts days so we were looking forward to moving them outside anyway.

Like I said before we start each Concept Week with a project, so since the seeds they planted were grown enough to go out they helped me fill in the raised beds with dirt, bring the trays out, and replant the new plants.

For schoolwork I went to this site and printed up a bunch of pages about gardening and farming for us to do.  Most of the pages were coloring pages, which they really just scribbled on since they really don't care for coloring, but they all had information on them about gardening.  So even though they just scribbled we did read the pages and they learned about the different tools and different plants, and what plants need to grow.

The last thing we did was read a book about gardening.  I love The Magic School Bus series so I was glad that we could use one of their books for our lesson.  We used "The Magic School Bus Plants Seeds: A Book About How Living Things Grow."  In the book the class is taking care of their class garden and Phoebe's sad since all her flowers are in her class garden back at her old school.  So the class takes a field trip to go check on how her flowers are doing.  While we planted vegetables and not flowers the book was still neat.  Plus, it gave me a chance to explain that most of our future vegetables would start out as flowers that turn into a vegetable.  This lesson sunk in the other day when we went outside and discovered that our cucumber flowers had turned into little baby cucumbers!