Abigail's Day: Garden Theme

This last week our Homeschool theme was "Gardens"...I can't remember now why I jumped ahead and did my garden theme early-instead of staying with my creation story theme...it didn't matter too much to Ransom, who knows the story of Adam and Eve well and seemed to not be bothered by jumping ahead to God's creation of a garden. But, I think if I were to do it again, I'd obviously wait and do this theme in the right order ( hand to forehead).

Anyway, I introduced the theme by telling Ransom the creation story yet again, focusing on God creating a Garden for Adam and Eve to live in. We then talked about "creating" and what that meant. We talked about things we have created ( I gave the example of baking cookies and painting a picture). I guided Ransom in telling me all the ingredients that would go into making cookies and painting a picture ( i.e. the paints, the paper, the brushes, water etc.)- we then talked about how different God's creations are! That God made things from SCRATCH!

Activity 1: Create a Garden plan

We created our own gardens ( a BIG thank you to my mom for this idea, plus giving us all the supplies! Hooray for an easy activity!) .

This was just a simple art project but it was fun and also re-enforced God's creativity in creation.

Things you'll need:

Stickers of flowers, fruit, veggies and trees.

Green paper

Activity 2: Parts of the flower lesson.

My friend Tina told me about taping contact paper to the window, sticky side out a long time ago, but I didn't find any contact paper the one time I went to the store for it...BUT I used Press N' Seal from Glaad which I looooved already from my kitchen use ( I hate cling wrap) and it worked GREAT! I taped large strips of Press N' Seal to the window and then I had cut out felt into the different parts of the flower...the stem, the flower, and the roots, I used actual beans for the seed which I was nervous about sticking to the Press N' Seal, but it ended up working! HOORAY!

Things you'll need:

Green felt-cut into strips for the stem and cut into various leaf shapes ( I'm a TERRIBLE cutter ( I blame being left handed so my flowers were definitely not perfect, but my kids didn't care!)

Flower colored felt- I had red and orange so that's what i went with. I cute various "blooms" for our flowers.

Brown, green string-Cut into small pieces for the roots

Dried Beans

Press N' Seal or contact paper

Tape

-Ransom quickly learned about each part of the flower and was able to put them all together properly and know what they did.

-Tabitha enjoyed making...."things" with the different pieces.

-it was important to just let them both go wild with the ingredients at the end, making their own creations. the OCD part of me wanted to stick with making "proper flowers" the whole time.

Activity 3:

Nature walk

I wish I had done the "treasure hunt" version of this where I had pictures/words of things I wanted Ransom to specifically look for-but I didn't have my act together so I just told him as we went what I wanted him to find.

Things you'll need:

Make a treasure hunt before hand to make it more fun! OOPS!

Don't forget to save any "seeds" that you collect for the next activity!

Activity 4: Sorting and Graphing Seeds

We talked about all the different shapes and sizes of seeds we had found on our nature walk, plus I showed him some others I had collected ( beans, apple seeds, pumpkin seeds, some seed pods and "gum balls" from a sweet gum tree...)

Ransom then had to sort them and count each kind.

He then glued one of each at the bottom of his graph paper. Then had to color the corresponding squares/number of seeds.

( Tabitha played with cups of dried beans during this activity) But I also had this "letter sheet" for her to do!)

Books: