Plant Parts

Our study of plants fell when there was still snow flying, which doesn't really make me think about planting plants!  We decided to hold off until later this month with the planting but to go ahead and study plants in the unit where they were intended.  To learn about the parts of a plant, we made these little "lift-the-flap" sheets.  It is an 11x17 sheet of paper so they had plenty of room.

We started off by doing a directed drawing of sorts by putting each part of the plant in the correct section.  Once the part of the plant was drawn, students labeled that particular section of the plant.

 After drawing and labeling, we opened the paper flat to cut on those black lines to have flaps to lift.  We talked about only cutting to the fold or you would not have 1 piece of paper anymore and you would be sad.  To my delight, 100% followed these directions and everyone's paper was intact at the end of day 1!

On day 2, we lifted each flap and wrote a fact about that part of the plant.  I wrote these facts on the SMARTboard for students, and they copied them into the appropriate section on their paper.  We only opened the flap we were working on at the time so the writing didn't go into the next section.  Once we were finished with 1 section, that flap was closed and the next one was opened.

"The stem takes food all around the plant."

On the third day, students had a snack of different plant parts.  They wrote each "part" on the "flap" side of the book.  We didn't label seeds on our paper, but we did taste seeds, so we just wrote these at the bottom of the roots part of our paper.They were surprised to find new vegetables that they thought they didn't like, but learned that, after trying them, they weren't all that bad.  Their favorite seemed to be finding the peas inside the pea pods.

Broccoli: flower, Lettuce: leaves, Celery: stem, Carrot: root, Peas: seeds