Botany Week 1

Week 1 went better than I expected.  The kids were a little chatty (the boys!), but on the whole they paid attention and seemed to get the basics of the class.  I had 3 objectives for the students - be able to define botany, practice using taxonomy, and be able to classify a plant as vascular or non-vascular.

To define botany, we decorated our nature notebooks with a collage of plants. 

This one is Caleb's - he is in my class this year.

humanoid

From there we talked about taxonomy or classification.  The last time I taught Botany, I had all the kids take off a shoe and we classified the shoes.  This is fun, but time consuming.  Also the kids coming to enrichment usually all wear similar shoes - no high heels or orthopedic sneakers, etc.  So I searched for a simpler exercise and settled on an alien classification game I found online.  It had a set of cards with different aliens - some "fish-like" and some humanoid and the kids got into groups to sort out the aliens.  This was also fun and unusual.  The groups didn't all use the same features to classify their aliens. 

The first major division of plants is between vascular and non-vascular plants.  I had all the children go out and collect a specimen (find a leaf).  We compared the veins in the leaf with the veins in our wrists and I drank water through a straw to help illustrate how vascular plants use the veins or tubes in their leaves to move water.  The kids did a rubbing of the leaf and labeled the basic parts. 

To demonstrate how non-vascular plants differ from vascular plants, I sprayed a little water in the center of each group (from the aliens) and placed a paper towel on top.  The kids and I had collected several pieces of moss from our backyard earlier in the day and I gave each student a piece and a magnifying glass.

The students then drew a picture of the moss and labeled the page Non-Vascular.

At that point, we were out of time!  But that was all that I had planned for anyway.  I had hoped to get the kids sketchbooks, but the inexpensive ones I saw at Walmart were sold out by the time I made supply purchases and the ones at Staples were $15 each!  (The supply budget for the class is $12 per student.)  Live and learn and next time buy earlier!  Placing the pages in the folders correctly is not easy for this age group!