After we finished our Montessori Human Body Study, Lila decided she wanted to learn about plants.  Specifically, she wanted to learn about trees, leaves, flowers, and plants we eat — so that’s how I designed our botany study!  Our full botany study lasted almost 4 full months, so I’ll be sharing just a part of it here today.

As you probably know by now if you’ve been reading along for a while, Montessori learning is designed to go from broadest concepts to the most detailed, so we began our botany study with a study of plants in general before diving into the more detailed parts that Lila was interested in.

We began by learning about the parts of a plant using cards made by Montessori Materials.  After matching all the pieces as 3-part cards, we brought over a terrarium we had been growing to identify the parts of the plant that we could see there!

We used some of our beloved encyclopedias to read about how plants grow from a seed — so don’t forget to check out our book list at the bottom of this post!

We had planned on taking a field trip to Phipps Conservatory to look at all the plants there, but crazy life changes got in the way and we had to put it off until after we moved — but we did eventually get there!

Next we sorted some plants by trees, bushes, and herbaceous plants using these Types of Plants Sorting Cards.  We read the descriptions of characteristics of each (not pictured, but included in the printable), then sorted each picture card into the right category.

We used those cards as a jumping off point for our more detailed tree study, as I put the other two categories away for a few weeks as we spent some time learning all about trees — stay tuned for that post soon!

We rely heavily on wonderful children’s books for all of our themed studies, and here are the books we used to study the plants in general as part of our botany study:

Usborne 1,000 Things in Nature

The Usborne Children’s Encyclopedia

Usborne It All Starts With a Seed… How Food Grows

The Tiny Seed, by Eric Carle

 

Stay tuned as we continue to dive deeper into our botany study!

 

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