Seeds and Planting in Kindergarten

Wednesday is WACKY in Kinderland.  Well, in my Kinderland! We have an early release every Wednesday for PLC time so our half day program gets even shorter. We've dubbed it 
WACKY WEDNESDAY 
and I use it as the day to teach science. 

(All the cool stuff!) 

Today we focused on planting seeds!

We were really lucky to have a garden built for us by Home Depot thanks to a wonderful grandparent from our school that did all of the leg work.  It's amazing!  Now that it is springtime we really wanted to get some things growing in our garden.  We started seeds today in hopes of growing some little seedlings to transplant to the garden. 

I started with some books from our Garden browsing box.  This is a great time to highlight a browsing box to introduce some of the books in there.  I guarantee that it will be empty next Monday when we shop for books again! 

Then we watched a BrainPop Jr. video about the life cycle of a seed.  This helped remind us of some vocabulary we learned earlier in the year when we studied apples and pumpkins. 

We used these little green houses that were also donated by Home Depot.  They are the perfect size for Kinders. 

OK, I know some people stop right here and say, "Wait a minute....aren't they going to make a mess?"  Well, that's possible (and yes one got dumped) but the positives outweigh the negatives.  I promise!  

Here is how we did it.  I had them pick up a green house and take it back to their seats.  They took out their seeds to see what they got and we made a list on the board.  It was fun to try to read words like Zannia, Marigold, and Zuchinni!  

Then each child came up and got a scoop of soil.  They went back to their seat to observe the soil and we talked about how their soil was different than dirt. 

Once we all had the soil they all opened up their seeds.  The coolest part of this was that they were all different so they got to compare the seeds at their table.  They were amazed that some seeds were tiny and some were quite large! 

We added a little more soil over the top of the seeds and we were done!  Here is the finished product! 

We finished up our day with a little HOW TO writing on how to plant a seed.  It was a great opportunity for me to see how they are doing with this since we have written a couple of HOW TO books in the last couple of weeks.  

Did you love this? Pin it for later! 

That's what worked well for me today!  What worked for you?  You can share your fun lessons on the KinderTribe blog by linking up with What Worked Well Wednesday!