After learning about plants in general, trees, leaves, and flowers, we began learning about plants we eat!  This part of the study was severely impacted by our move — we started in one house and ended in the second, and I would have loved to do a ton of things that I ended up skipping because life was just so chaotic.  As with our flower study, I’ll still include what I had planned even if we didn’t do it, because this was an awesome study!

I had planned on using some of our Usborne Encyclopedias to study a bit of the history of farming, but this was one part that I ended up skipping in favor of the more hands-on lessons.

Instead, we began with these From Plant to Food Matching Cards to learn about some plants that humans turn into other products to eat.

The girls also really enjoyed these Fruit Inside and Out Matching Cards.

We decided to start with fruits, and learned about the life cycle of a fruit tree with these Apple Tree Life Cycle Cards.  We paid special attention to the fruits on our plates at meals that day, and talked about what they looked like, how they tasted, and where their seeds are.

The next day, we did the same with the vegetables on our plates at meals.

We learned about nuts and then tasted five different kinds once we got to our new house!

We did the same with chocolate (cocoa beans) and rice, but like I said before, life was super crazy then and I didn’t take any photos.  With the rice, we matched each type to where they grow on our continents globe.

Our favorite tasting was probably our herb tasting, where we also matched each herb to these Cooking Herbs 3-Part Cards.  When we finished, we used the herbs to practice our scissor skills, releasing the scent of each into the room as we cut.

The move made this a pretty anticlimactic end to our months-long botany study, but I’m glad we still managed to fit in most of what I had planned to learn about everything Lila requested.

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

Usborne Encyclopedia of World History

It All Starts With a Seed… How Food Grows

Mott’s A is for Apple, by Megan E. Bryant

The Life and Times of the Apple, by Charles Micucci

Oliver’s Vegetables, by Vivian French

Growing Vegetable Soup, by Lois Ehlert

Busy in the Garden, by George Shannon

 

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