Botany Unit Study and Lesson Plan

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I think this was our longest unit this year. Have I mentioned that this was a strange year? It was really different for us because for the first time we had lots of things going on outside of our "Family School." The older boys had classes once a week at a co-op, plus some extra sports (and Abe turned 1 and got a job!), the girls were doing swimming and gymnastics with money from an online charter school, and all of the children had extra technology and science classes that weren't completely put together by me! It was fun to have some variety, but a little sad to give up some of the time together that we've loved. I guess that's what happens as the children grow up! 

Anyway, we kept our family school units going twice a week, so everything took a little longer to get through, but we still had a good time. Here are some links we found useful:

Flowers and plants Pinterest board

I found myself suddenly interested in bulbs. Here is a good summary of the difference between bulbs, tubers, rhizomes, and corms. And here's another good explanation of what bulbs are.

We made the prettiest bracelets out of juniper berries—which are really the soft cones of juniper trees!

Have you wondered the difference between cedars and junipers? Now you can know!

We have the lovely Utah Juniper all over in our area. (And of course the lovely Juniper Lark lives in our house, ha ha.)

The kids had a surprising amount of fun with this activity, even though I thought it would be too young for them!

I want to do this activity in the Fall

Here is a photosynthesis video, and here's another. It was hard finding good ones! This one was pretty good, though.

Venus flytrap in action

Simple explanations of transpiration and capillary action

Our very first unit was on Flowers! It seems so long ago.

We had a Tree Unit several years ago, too.

I liked Marigold's plant cell drawing!

We looked at plant cells through a microscope.

Here we have 6 molecules of CO2 and 6 molecules of H2O…

Which are re-organized into a huge glucose molecule (C6-H12-O6) and 6 molecules of O2!

We loved modeling photosynthesis and cellular respiration! It makes it so much clearer when you can see the components actually being reused in different molecules. This is the basic idea, but we used marshmallows instead.

One day we tasted foods that come from all parts of a plant.

Peppers=fruit

Bananas=fruit

Carrot=root

Onion=bulb

Peas=seeds

Radish greens=leaves

Asparagus=flowers and stems

This project never works the way I want it to. Maybe I don't use enough food coloring in the water.

You can see a liiiiiittle blue in the petals, though.

We started a bunch of seeds indoors because it was too cold outside. I've never done that before, but it was fun. Malachi used them for his herb garden project, for one of his classes at the co-op we're part of.

Here are instructions for making a terrarium. We loved making these! I used assorted containers I found at the thrift store for a dollar or two. And they instantly made the house look so green and vibrant! I am not used to having many plants around (inside, anyway).

The best part of these terrariums (terraria?) was putting little tiny animals in them!

We have this little microgreens planter and we love it! Microgreens are just baby vegetables. They are a little more mature than sprouts (which are just barely-sprouted seeds), and they have tiny new leaves rather than just the first cotyledons, but you can use any kind of seeds to grow them. I think these were broccoli and radish greens. Or maybe mustard? Or maybe basil? I can't quite remember. We have tried lots of kinds! They all taste a little different. This batch grew really fast—they had sprouted by the second day!

You harvest the microgreens just by clipping them with scissors. We ate this batch on grilled cheese sandwiches and they were SO GOOD. We also like them in scrambled eggs. Or sprinkled on pasta. Yum!

Collecting Insects

We had so much fun collecting insects wherever we went during this unit! We took our nets and jar with us whenever we drove anywhere, and we took several field trips specifically to search for insects in different habitats. The beautiful Fall weather made this the perfect time to enjoy being outside and insect-hunting! We ended up letting lots of insects free after catching them, since we only really wanted one of most things for our collection. Sometimes the children made little "homes" for the insects in boxes and jars so they could observe them for a few days before letting them go. So fun.

You can see our finished (at least for now) insect collection in this post. There are also details on what collecting supplies we used.

By the creek—there were so many dragonflies and damselflies here! And they are FAST!

Millcreek Canyon

Silver Lake

North shore of the Great Salt Lake, near the Spiral Jetty. This was a really strange and interesting place because there was a whole line of dead insects, preserved in the salt flats around the lake. We found HUNDREDS of dead ladybugs, and lots of beetles and praying mantises and grasshoppers and other things too. It was really fascinating. We weren't sure why there were so many: maybe they were insects from all over the lake that had died while drinking the salt water, and then they all washed ashore here?

Millcreek Canyon, again

American Fork Canyon—getting a little schoolwork done as well! :)

Bonsai Art

Sam teaches an Art Lesson to the children (and me) when he can on Fridays, so during this unit he taught a class using Bonsai as a vehicle for some fundamental art principles. He showed this video on fractals and then discussed areas of rest and areas of detail, line flow within a composition, etc. He had us draw bonsai using big shapes and try to make them interesting and dynamic with the shapes they chose. After they had their shapes drawn, he had them fill in the shapes using ink and paintbrushes. It was quite fun to do, because the ink was so satisfyingly wet and bold and black! :)

Our bonsai pictures.

For awesome pictures of bonsai (and instructions on how to grow and cultivate them, but that is way too big of a project for us right now!), we recommend this DK Publishing book: Bonsai. We loved looking through it. We just love bonsai in general! 

We liked this video about bonsai, and especially the teeny tiny MINI bonsai they show, no bigger than your thumb. The cutest! Daisy almost died of happiness.

We went to a store that sells bonsai (Cactus and Tropicals) so we could see some in person. We like them so much. If they didn't seem like so much work to keep alive and beautiful, I would definitely want some in our house!

Japanese Cherry Blossom Art

Inspired by these collages and these lovely paintings, we decided to do a combination of the two and make some multimedia pictures of Japanese cherry blossoms (or sakura.) We liked learning about the significance of sakura to the Japanese, and its symbolic associations with the samurai and the fragility of human life. This video tells more about cherry blossoms, and we also liked this book about the cherry trees Japan gave to the United States.

Utah actually has a similar story: Boy Scouts in Japan donated some cherry trees to the International Peace Gardens in Salt Lake, but they had to be burned because of quarantine issues. You can read that story here.

We made these paintings by first washing a thin coat of blue paint onto watercolor paper (cut into long rectangles to look sort of like a Japanese scroll). Some of the children put a paper cup over their paper and painted around it to leave a white "moon" in the background.

Then we put lines of very watered-down brown tempura paint onto our papers and blew along the paint with a straw. This was supposed to move the paint organically down the paper and make it fork into natural-looking branches. It worked pretty well, though it was hard not to blow down and make a big blob on the paper. We got better at it as we went along. We also kept getting light-headed, so if you try this remember to take breaks every now and then.

Last, we put little squares of pink tissue paper around the eraser side of pencils, dipped them in glue, and pressed them onto the paper. I remember how much I liked doing this in kindergarten, and I STILL like it. It's just fun.

Some of the children wanted to write things on their pictures, so they looked up kanji characters and tried to copy them.

Junie's cherry tree. She did this all by herself. I like it.