Creative Classroom: Seeds

Seeds have played a big role in our classroom this past month.
There are so many great books about seeds and gardening for kids out there. We started with Growing Vegetable Soup by Lois Elhert, The Tiny Seed by Eric Carle, and Seeds! Seeds! Seeds by Nancy Wallace.

A favorite activity was sorting seeds using tweezers. The seed sorting kit: 6 packets of seeds (I checked first to make sure they were big enough to pick up with tweezers), a 6 pack egg carton, and tweezers. In case you were wondering, our seeds were pumpkin, watermelon, cucumber, zinnia, peas, and sunflowers. I taped a sample seed on the front of the packet.
To sort: dump all the seeds into the clear container then carefully sort them into the egg carton with tweezers. This activity helped to build fine motor skills, seed recognition, and cooperative learning, not to mention patience! At the end, put the seeds back into the seed packets.
Another fun game is the Seed Match. I taped a number of seeds (from 1-10) on a card then wrote the number and added a picture of the kind of seed on another card. So, you will match the 10 seeds on the yellow card to the green "ten" card and discover that the seeds are onion seeds. Each yellow card has a different number of seeds. This worked well with all those small seeds I had.

Games to play: simple matching, memory, put the seed cards in a bag and feel how many seeds to match. The kids found several uses for this one.
Of course we also had to find seeds in food. I bought 19 different kinds of fruit and veggies that held seeds. Each kid got to find the seeds inside.
We made a seed collection.
After our exploration, we cut up the fruits and veggies to make fruit salad and vegetable soup.
I think it goes without saying, but we planted seeds, too! We are monitoring our seeds' growth on a timeline and have hopes to transplant the seedlings in the school's garden.
I hope you find ways to explore and learn about seeds with your kids.