Started with reading this book- it's great because it gets kids thinking about the variety of stems
Then we broke the kids into rotations. Rotation 1 was a scavenger hunt for stems in the Discovery Garden- they were told to partner up and find at least 10 different stems. I was surprised how much the kids engaged with this.
They were a very careful group so I told them they could pinch a couple samples off the tops of plants with lots of stems on them. But you can also just have the kids write down or share descriptions.
They talked about their favorites at the end. We had a little time to write a few notes about their stems in their Nature Journals, but for longer classes (this was only 45min) that is an option. We used words like "woody, firm, soft" and noticed how some stems were more rigid that had lots of leaves on them, and the ones with flowers were very soft and green.
Rotation 2 was observing celery sticks. These don't look so pretty, (all the water spilled out on the way over!) but they were cool to observe. The kids split them open and we talked about the parts of the stem that carry the water like pipes.
Kids wrote down observations in the celery handout. After they observed the celery (this took about 5+ minutes, kids constructed stems. I gave them each a scrap of fabric and asked them to build a stem out of it with a few other objects. We talked about the properties of stems and how they have to be rigid and have structure. They really liked this.
The stem construction bag is in the Gardening Parent drawers.
The third station was Garden Observation and writing in their nature journals. I also had a stem handout from the lesson folder.
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