January 9, 2011

A House for a Seed

We learned in our botany study this last week that a fruit is really a name for the material that surrounds a seed. In our last unit on seeds, we discovered that lots of things have seeds. In this unit we learned that anything with a seed is a fruit. That includes things we commonly think of as vegetables: like tomatos, cucumbers, nuts, wheat etc these are technically fruits...the fruit is the house for the seed.
We cut open a few apples and pears to look more at these houses. Following the helpful instructions in Nature Printing (a beautiful book with about 30 nicely designed nature crafts in them.) we went about painting the cut open flesh and printing their images on paper. The boys had a ball!

The book recommends using watercolors because the fruits tend to be already very wet...as you can see from Max's first attempt.

Once the apple was printed TJ noticed it looked  alot like a butterfly...here he is adding some atenna to the butterfly body.
And this one looks like a sun!
Zak the surly artist.
A great cloud of witness....(note the onlooking artist on the wall)
And to finish off this rather short unit on fruits we memorized the parts of the fruit.
These cards can be found here...Zak's fine color choices brighten up the lesson.
These cards we played concentration with, and match the label.
It was the first time the boys wrote the names on the cards themselves! Cool! The pocket was added to the botany lapnotebook.
Our text for this unit was Exploring Creation with Botany Ch. 5.

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