Germinating

We have already germinated and planted green beans or string beans & we discussed various things from parts of the plant to life cycles. Recently we started talking about the kinds of things we eat. Learning that peas were actually seeds was interesting, especially to Maggie.  Prior to this activity, Maggie had peas for dinner a few nights back.  She asked me what part of the plant she was eating.  I said seeds.  It wasn’t until I showed her pea seeds for our new seeds to germinate that the idea took hold. She looked at the dried up pea and smiled.

Our setup included a few things.  Firstly, pea seeds to see a new bean life cycle & note the difference. We started out radish seeds & wild onions maggie collected on one of her trips in the woods with daddy.  She brought back seeded flowers. And we discussed that it was once a flower, I found a pic on the Internet, and then we saved the seeds until now. For fun we soaked an avocado seed.  And also sunflower seeds.  Maggie mentioned if they were the same seeds we eat & I explained that part.

We also have a seed that was already germinated that was the seed from our last batch of green beans we grew.  As they died off we dissected the pieces & saved the seeds.  Most were lost but one survived that we planted in dirt in a cup.

This will lead us into our next activity of transplanting our recycled store bought green onions to the outdoors where they can grow better & transplanting our germinated seeds into dirt revolving into another cycle of planting outside.

Maggie sorts through seeds noticing their differences in size & shape.

Lily notices the size and loves the texture of the seeds too.

Lily did a great job pouring the water onto her paper towel to get it wet before putting it in the cup.  After each try she successfully ‘fixed’ the problem by being more careful each time she poured.

After planting each seed type Lily sang her beans are magic song where Maggie joined in.  She likes to sing to the beans to help them grow. 🙂