Why Do Leaves Change Color in the Fall?

It’s the perfect time of year to explore why and how leaves change color!  This leaf chromatography experiment makes the answer to those questions a bit more tangible and understandable. Why DO leaves change color? So let’s start off by making sure we all understand how leaves change color in the fall.  Basically, leaves are made…

Flower Activity–Pressing Flowers

    Pressing flowers is a great way to preserve a moment of summer beauty.   Once pressed, you can use them to create bookmarks, necklaces, collages, or simply glue them into a scrapbook or journal. I like to start by making a fun activity out of collecting the flowers, creating either a scavenger hunt…

Learning through Scavenger Hunts

One of my all-time favorite activities to create is the scavenger hunt.  There are so many ways to use a scavenger hunt as a tool of exploratory learning in the garden.  I’ve used scavenger hunts to: Teach students to recognize the plants in their garden plots (ex:  find the cucumber plant, find the carrot plant,…

Stem Activity–classic celery dye experiment and some new variations

This experiment is so satisfying because it shows great results in just a few hours.  Demonstrate how stems transport liquid with the classic celery experiment, and then extend the experiment with a couple interesting variations. First off, pick celery with leaves still attached, as it will quicken the process and also show more dramatic results….

Root activity–Grow a sweet potato

Start off with a firm sweet potato from the grocery store.  If it has little buds already, great!  The potato will grow even faster.  I like to start off by asking students if they think the potato is alive (it is).  Then I would ask what part of the plant students think the potato comes…

Plant Parts Song

Use music and body movements to learn plant parts.   The movements for the song can be used alone, in moments where students needed a movement activity to get out some energy.   We would simply act out the plant parts without the song, or play a version of Simon Says using the movements.  We…

Plant Part of the Week

One of my students’ favorite activities was the Plant Part of the Week.   And for that week, we would do activities centered around that plant part, as well as learn to recognize foods that we eat of that plant part (maybe cooking projects to taste those foods?).  There were so many little activities which…

Root Activity–carrot bracelet

Make slices of dried root vegetables into beads for necklaces or bracelets!  I have only done this with typical orange carrots, but I would be curious to see how yellow or purple carrots turn out, as well as beets, radishes or turnips. First, the root vegetables need to be thinly sliced.  This is the only…