Flowers and Growing

This year we had a gardening theme going, not that we will stop gardening until we've harvest all our produce in the autumn, thought I would share some of what we did.

The children where very busy with gardening, sorting out what we will plant in our garden and up the allotment, art and craft project, these have included making these wonderfully decorated foam flowers

                          

Painting pots to plant some plants in.

We also made some collage sunflower pictures and with the older ones, we talked about what the different parts of the plant are and why they are important to the plant, what their jobs are.

We used string for the roots and talked about how the roots anchor a plant in the ground and bring water and nutrients from the soil to the rest of the plant. We used a straw for a stem to represent the support and how strong a plants stem is and seeds for the centre part as this is were at the end of the flowers life they would be formed.

                          

                          

                          

                           

They also made some very large tissue paper flowers, that looked brilliant but were very simple to make. Simply put two to three sheets of tissue paper together

                        
 and fold,

                        

wrap a piper cleaner round the middle and fan out the paper

                       

snip away to create the petals.

                        

We also planted sunflower, sweetcorn and pea seeds. I then sorted out some different shaped seeds into a paint tray and left the empty packets and the children tried to sort out which plant grew from which seed. Which led to much chatter and lots of surprise at how small some seeds were etc

                            

We planted some bean seeds in some cotton wool in a plastic bag, we taped it to the patio door and watched them with grow with fascination, it was great for the littleones to see the roots growing, everyday they would check on them to see what was happening.

A trip to the allotment to plant out our beans.

                                 

                                 

After growing and planting out our bean plants, we read the story of Jack and the Beanstalk and then played a game based around the story. I drew out a rough beanstalk in chalk, placed some bean seeds on each leave and  placed the pile of cards that would make the giant. The idea is each time we through the dice if we got a six then you turned over a piece of the giant, if you got another number then you collected that amount of seeds. The idea is to collect all the seeds before you have made the giant. After that they had fun acting out the story and pretending to climb the bean stalk.

The sunflower seeds have done very well and if they continue, we should  have a lovely display in the garden. We are still waiting for the sweetcorn to do something, hopefully grow and the peas have been planted out into the garden and so far are doing well.

                        

We also had a trip to the garden centre to choose some plants and seeds.

We also enjoyed singing lots of different nursery rhymes and songs to do with gardens and flowers including Mary, Mary Quite Contrary,  Lavenders Blue, Round and Round The Garden and finally  Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush.

Had fun playing the Flower Pot game, lots of chances to recognise/match colours, count leaves and compare the size of everyone's flowers.

You can see our colourful rice garden here

We made some leaf and flower pictures using different items we found in the garden, something I might add to my flowers theme, when we do it again flowers and leaves pictures

Another idea to add to my spring planning for next year printing flowers using the inner rolls of kitchen rolls etc, very effective.