Seeds and Sprouts

It's just a weed, but isn't it cute the way that lupin sprouts and discards it's seed casing above the ground?

Over the past week or so, we have been looking at seeds. We collected different types of seeds for E to examine and compare. We found them in the pantry, in foods we ate, in the garden and in our store of 'to be planted one day' seeds. E liked finding weed seeds in the garden, but I think her favourite method was cutting open fruits to see what the seeds inside were like.

Seeds have been used for counting and for sorting. We collected and dried some rockmelon and chilli seeds from our garden produce to be added to our 'to be planted one day' collection.
I set up a tray with a few different types of seeds for E to play with. It had kidney beans, pumpkin seeds, red lentils, sunflower seeds and mustard seeds. I also included a few empty cups to encourage pouring and exploring. It didn't take long for it all to be mixed together.

Once E started to get bored with her seed tray, I introduced some playdough to the activity. The playdough became the base for seed pictures and creatures with seed faces and some seeds were tucked up into a playdough bed.

E learnt a little about growing seeds, too. We talked about how the plants in our garden started out as seeds and we planted some cress seeds in little egg-shell 'eggheads'.

I also pulled out the dried corn from a few weeks ago and we sprouted some of the kernels in a zip-lock bag with a damp paper towel (thanks to an idea from "Science is Simple" by Peggy Ashbrook).

We finished up by watching "Life of Plants" (narrated by David Attenborough). E liked the time-lapse scenes and pretended to be a plant growing up and up.

-Polly