Seed Planting

As I’ve said before we loved The Lorax movie.  The book has been a favorite of ours for years and I love how much even little ones take away from the story.  But the movie brings it to a whole new level.  The message of conservation is now larger than life and set to music.  As soon as we left the kids wanted to plant their own seeds and help the earth.  Even my 3 1/2 year old was talking about how trees make our air better.  Woo hoo!

So, this year we decided to let them start their container gardens from seeds instead of buying the small plants we usually do.  At Lowe’s there were tons and tons and tons of seeds to choose from.  It took us quite awhile to narrow down out choices and in the end we decided to start with 5 different kinds and then add in small tomato plants when they are in the stores.

We chose organic cilantro, basil, jalapeno peppers, peas, and sweet peppers.  We also got these cool starter pots that can be transplanted directly into the container gardens.

To introduce the activity we read Seeds by Melvin and Gilda Berger [Scholastic, 2007] and talked about how our seeds were going to grow and what they needed to change into plants.  The kids each have different levels of plant background knowledge and the photos in this informational text are great for illustrating the different steps of the process.  Seeds is also a great reference to use as the plants begin to grow to compare each stage of growth and to determine what will happen next.

 As they plants begin to grow we are going to observe and chart their progress in a plant journal.  They can record their observations with words and drawings and measure and label the height of the plants.  Then in May we will have a bunch of new herbs and veggies for our containers gardens.  And three kids who like to grow things not only because it’s fun, but because they have learned that doing so improves our earth.  The Lorax would be proud!

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