Mrs. Curry's Kindergarten, how does your garden grow?

Mrs. Curry's Kindergarten,

How Does Your Garden Grow?

We recently began a whole science unit on Life & Living Things in The World Around Us.  To synthesize this concept, we are focusing on plants in a garden.  We began the unit talking about how plants have different parts: roots, stems, leaves, flowers, fruits/vegetables, and seeds, and with some plants you can eat some of these parts.  We looked at squash, carrots, tomatoes, lettuce, potatoes, and turnips.  We matched to word with the vegetable by predicting beginning sounds.  Then we constructed sentences using sight word cards from our word wall and vegetable words taken from seed packets.  Using these tools, we made sentences like: "A tomato is a plant that I can eat." OR "A carrot is a root that I can eat."  To reinforce concepts of print (like the fact that spaces separate words), we cut apart the words in our sentences and then tried to glue them back together in order.  The results looked like this:

 

 

Then we planted a vegetable garden, making sure to talk about the things plants need to grow: Sun, water, warmth, nutrients from the soil, and space to grow.  This is what our garden looked like after planting it:

 We have been watering it, leaving it in the sunshine, and bringing it inside if it is supposed to be very cold at night.

While we are waiting for it to grow, we have been reading so many things to learn about plants and gardens!  Within this genre we have also been looking at the difference between fiction and nonfiction.  We have learned the structure of a fiction story (with a beginning that sets it up, a middle that has action and/or a problem, and an ending that resolves and wraps it up) and the features of nonfiction (true information, diagrams, illustrations, labels, photographs, and bold words).  Here are some of the things we have read so far:

 



Our garden is growing!  Look at this progress: