This week, we started on a new project. We are going to learning about plants and growing things. My plan is to intigrate this project into all of the curriculum areas: science (obviously), reading/writing and math. You may recall that Nate DOES NOT like to write. Today, i asked him to share by illustrating the photos in the blog. His words will be in blue. I will then elaborate, if needed. Monday we opened seeds up, planted seeds. I saw a leaf in a seed. I traced each seed. We looked inside the seeds only 3 had a leaf. We explored 5 different beans/seeds, pinto, lima, pumpkin, watermelon and popcorn. I had Nate trace them. Then we opened them up to see what was inside. Some had little bitty leaves. Then Nate drew pictures on what he saw inside. I put them in a bag. We put wet paper towels and one of each type of seed in in three ziploc bags. We did not seal them. We put them in the window. The bags worked like a greenhouse for our seeds.

I put them in some soil. We used some of Papa's cafe. I found this cool planter at Target. It made of biodegradable material. After they sprout indoors we can separate the squares and plant the whole thing outside. We planted 5 of each of the 5 seeds. Papa was teasing Nate when we was watering them about pouring his coffee on them. So one row, we decided to "water" with coffee to see what happens. we'll keep you posted.

Today (Friday) we looked at the seeds in the plastic bags. (We have checked on them each day, but wanted to up date today). This is one of our lima beans. It has quite a sprout and some pretty good size leaves peeking out already.

This is one of our pumpkin seeds. we are hoping to grow our own pumpkins for Halloween this year. The sprout on this one has some neat "segmentation" (is that a word?). We are going to have to look that up.

Here is one of our pinto beans, just starting to sprout.

So far, the watermelon seeds and the popcorn have not sprouted. I'm not sure we will have any success with the popcorn. I snagged it from a microwave popcorn bag and I'm afraid it might have been smothered by whatever else was in there. But, we'll see. That's the fun of experimenting.

Check in often. I plan to update weekly on our plant project. We will be doing some other fun plant experiments along the way.