Garden Books
These are the books we borrowed from the library this week. Our favorites were The Curious Garden, Planting a Rainbow and Bumblebee, Bumblebee, Do You Know Me. We read these often throughout the week, including Wiggle and Waggle which is actually a cute little chapter book!
Letter G Do-a-Dot
We like to begin our week with an introduction to the letter, using these dot pages from Shannon's Tot School. I gave Little M&M the choice of using stampers or magnetic pom poms. He chose a flower stamper today, with dot markers!
Letter G - Maze
Honey Pot loves mazes! She used this page from the Education website to follow both uppercase and lowercase G's.
Parts of a Flower
We learned the parts of a flower with the help of this puzzle from Homeschool Creations. Little M&M learned the names, and completed the picture.
Then I provided Honey Pot with the picture and word pieces.
She assembled the puzzle while naming each of the parts!
Tracing Lines
These printables also come from Homeschool Creations. I gave one each to Little M&M and Honey Pot.
Playdoh Fun
I pulled out our favorite playdoh tools, as well as two flower cookie cutters.
The kids started off by making cutouts...
even including a pipe cleaner stem!
Then they had some free play, making cupcakes, and using their scissors.
Looks delicious!
Garden Patterns
We brought out our trusty supply of paper cutouts, from my old scrapbooking stash. And we worked on color review and patterns. This was for Little M&M while big sister was at morning preschool.
Counting Flowers and Number Recognition
We worked on numbers 1-5 by counting flowers. He is a master at one-to-one correspondence, and is really starting to recognize all of these numbers.
A-Z Review - Flower Petals
I pulled out our fridge phonics and drew a picture of a flower to help Little M&M review the letters he's learned so far.
He would pick up a letter magnet, tell me what it was and then place it onto the matching flower petal.
A great little review!
Flower Color by Number - Hundreds Chart
This was an ambitious worksheet for Honey Pot, but she persevered! It comes from Lil Country Librarian. Great activity to work on recognizing those larger numbers.
Cupcake Liner Garden Craft
This was a fun craft! First the kids put their scissor skills to good use by creating the grass.
They chose their favorite cupcake liners from my baking supplies, and cut around the edges to make petals. Then they glued on some stems and flowers.
We also added circle cutouts and mini cupcake liners to the center of each flower.
Here is Little M&M drawing on some pollen and nectar. (Our many discussions on flowers this week spurred conversations about bees and what they do for flowers. Though I is for Insects week is coming up soon too!)
Here is his finished garden:
And this is Honey Pot's garden. She had the clever idea to use two heart cutouts to create a butterfly, and together we created the idea to use an oval cutout as a bee. She also drew on pollen, raindrops, a bird, a beehive, an ant and a worm. AWESOME.
Planting a Garden - Fine Motor and Color Matching
I found this fun idea from a website called Your Therapy Source. The evening before the activity I cut and glued straws onto a piece of cardboard, then threaded pipe cleaners onto flower cutouts.
Here is Little M&M planting his flowers.
Then Honey Pot gave it a try.
Beautiful!
Counting Seeds
I pulled out some beans from our sensory materials and used them as seeds for the kids to plant into these (cupcake mold) pots. We used these for a fun activity for Earth Day last year, remember?
First Honey Pot worked on some numbers in the teens:
Then Little M&M reviewed his small numbers again:
Once he finished though, he felt compelled to fill the pots up with as many seeds as would fit!
And pouring skills are good to work on too:
Plant Life Cycle - Sequencing
We used these printable flashcards from the Education website, to review the life cycle of a plant. It reinforced what is required for plants to grow as well!
Garden Collage
We took a walk around our yard and collected a few plants for our collage. The kids and I love exploring almost daily to see what new things are blooming. I provided them with a piece of contact paper, sticky side up, and they started created their collage.
They loved doing this!
I taped it to the window, and they really enjoy coming to look at it.
Sorting Flowers vs. Vegetables
This printable also comes from the garden pack over at Homeschool Creations. I like this simple activity because it shows that gardens come in so many varieties, not just flowers. We talked about what kinds of vegetables are grown in gardens. One of the books we borrowed from the library called Up, Down...Around actually also shows this in an interesting way. It describes which vegetables grow above the soil, below the soil, and which grow in looping vines such as pumpkins. That was a fun book!
Planting a Garden
We completed our garden week by doing something crucial to any garden unit: planting one! Honey Pot had received an adorable butterfly garden for Christmas, and we had been waiting for a good time to do it.
First we observed the various seeds that came with our kit. We noted their color and size differences.
Then we prepared our soil and decorated it with gravel, rocks and the butterfly friend (all included).
You can see in this picture that the kids also decorated their dome with gems and stickers. Such a cute and easy first garden for them. And they've been keeping an eye on it!
Within a few days, we already saw our first sprouts!
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