Wednesday 17 April 2013

Our Growing Story

We've been doing a lot of learning around the area of growing and planting recently. As it's Springtime, and a lot of the families in the setting live in the countryside, the children have been very aware of flowers growing and little animals popping up around the place.
I started with a project on learning about planting. We all planted a little pot of cat grass (the reason being that it begins to sprout after roughly 5 days, and it was nice for the children to see the results of their work without waiting a couple of weeks).


We each made a little book, called I Know How Seeds Grow. It was four pictures, which the kids coloured in and I stapled together, showing the story of a seed growing into a flower.
The next part of our project was really really fun. I collected a few bits and bobs from the second-hand shop, and asked one of the kids' dads to bring in some straw for us. And we made a....

Scarecrow!
It was a little bit tricky assembling him as a group, but we all learned about turn-taking and co-operation, so that was nice! He was named 'Dally', a mixture of the two most popular names- Daddy and Sally!

As you can see in the picture, he protected our plants as they grew,and we made sure to move them and let them get enough light, and watered them often. The kids were excited when they started to sprout, and they brought them home to plant after about a week.

We sang a song about our scarecrow at circle time:
I'm a little scarecrow,
raggedy and worn.
I wear a hat
and my shirt is torn.
When the crows fly here
I wave and shout
"Away from my garden,
Now get out!"

The interest in growing and planting continued after the project. My boss did 'The Importance of the Sun' and another girl at work crafted gorgeous sunflowers with the kids.
And so I decided to go with it, and keep their interest piqued. So we went on a little nature walk, collected dandelions, leaves, pine cones and pebbles. We made sure not to disturb anything that was growing.
 
With what we had collected (and lots more that I had sorted out behind the scenes) we took apart our home corner, and made our very own Garden Centre!


This has been such a hit, and the kids are so engaged when they play here. They enjoy 'planting' and replanting, pruning, watering, and looking after their seeds and plants!

I borrowed some of our aprons we use for painting and hung them at one side- they wear these when they 'work' in the garden centre.

We have a basket where we keep the leaves and flowers that we picked (as you can see, some of them aren't surviving as well as I'd hoped!)

We kept the cash register, and our basket of vegetables. Sometimes they stick the vegetables into the pots and 'grow' carrots and potatoes!

I made little seed packets, using a mixture of flowers the kids were aware of and some that they might not be. I filled them with the leftover seeds from the cat grass project.

As you can see, you can buy everything in the garden centre. This helps them to recognise numbers in the environment, and learn about counting, and adding. They've enjoyed this side of things too, with their pretend money in the cash register.

The final part of the garden centre project was when we made our own playdough, and used it to 'plant' lavender in (making it smell lovely). This however was only a partial success. They enjoyed making the playdough (measuring, mixing etc...) and using sticks as rollers, and pebbles for making patterns. But the more they used the playdough (and I'm talking minutes here, not over a period of days) the stickier and less usable it became! Well, we live and learn I suppose! And what I learned was I don't want to spend another evening scrubbing homemade playdough off every surface. So that wee project has been temporarily abandoned, until I find a better recipe! Bye for now!

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