Learning At Home: Plants

April was an extremely busy month with Hubby's and Big Bee's birthdays, complete with celebrations and parties, as well as Big Bee's CA2 preparations, so I did not work on a lot of homelearning activities for this month's theme - the wonderful world of plants! 

I got the inspiration for this theme when I observed the conspicuous interest that Little Bee has towards all things flowery and green! She loves flowers and will literally stop to admire and talk about any particular flower - its colour, shape, size, texture - whenever we walk past any striking flora.

This is an amazing theme with so many elements to explore, and it is unfortunate that Big Bee could not participate in most of these due to school work and CA revision, but I am sure I will revisit this theme during holidays soon! 

Featured books

Jack and the Beanstalk (wonderful story to impart this popular fable to young children as well as inculcate the life cycle of a plant from seed to, erm, a giant beanstalk in this case!)

Farmers Market (great way to educate the children on the origins of fruits and vegetables produce in the market!)

Plant Life Cycle (very pictorial way to teach little kids about life cycles of plants)

We also borrowed an abundance of books on trees, woods and flowers from the library - all fabulous books and too many to mention here!

Games

We played games with leaves that we collected around the estate, and explored how little white insects infested the leaves if we left them by the balcony for too long. The Bees were really grossed out by the Lilliputian white creepy crawlies, but I used the opportunity to highlight how the elements of nature are interconnected for sustainability. 

I usually introduced themes by immersing them in some light-hearted games so this month, I got them to dabble with Playdoh to create anything related to plants. Big Bee created this beautiful flower but Little Bee was more interested to make pancakes from Playdoh instead. 

So I got her to draw plants on the children's whiteboard using the circle template, and she drew a little meadow of flowers, complete with birds in the sky, a glowing sun and hills (if you can identify where the hills are!).

Reading

Little Bee is now learning to read short words, and she could also spell out some of the easier words independently (like "egg" and "cat"). I created an amateurish set of flashcards comprising of words she could already read to boost her confidence (like "dog" and "fish"), together with plant-related words like "tree", "sun", "rain" and "seed" to impart new words into her reading vocabulary. She is now able to read most of the words from the flashcards below, but it is an ongoing task because I have to consistently set aside a daily reading time to reinforce these words to her. It is not easy when she is in a playful or distracted mood! 

I do not teach her to read phonetically, as I am not convinced that was the best way (Big Bee and I did not learn to read by phonics!). Besides, I read that only about half of English words are spelt phonetically, so I would rather depend on the method of whole-word identification through recognising beginning words and the use of visual association for now. 

Beginning word recognition and writing 

This month, Little Bee focused on learning the lower case letters of "l" and "g". She is now able to identify the lower case "l" finally as it was previously a challenge because she would usually associate it with the number 1 or capital I. She was also able to find simple short words in the word puzzle below - all by herself! I was pleasantly surprised. 

She had been showing much interest in writing words now, and would tend to scribble a lot of gibberish and chanting what she was "writing" - exactly like her jie jie last time! 

So, I got her to copywrite some words like "flower", "leaf", "tree", "sun". She drew the pink leaf and attempted 3 renditions of butterflies beside the word "tree". 

Math and Mandarin

I did not do much academic or numbers-based Math learning for this theme, preferring instead to use leaves and flowers to get Little Bee to sort them according to sizes, shapes and colours. However, I got her to start writing numbers in numerals and Mandarin characters. She was able to complete the exercise below with me providing the guiding words on a separate sheet of paper but did not require guidance for matching the right set of Mandarin or numeric characters to the flowers. 

Little Bee is also getting better at reading Mandarin words, so I prepared flash cards for the below phrases, together with pictures for visual association, and now she can recognise these 2 phrases. 

Painting

As I spent most evenings coaching Big Bee on her impending CA2, I did not have the chance to paint much with them this month. These are a couple of paintings that Little Bee created when I asked her to paint something related to plants - a flower on one occasion and a tree on another evening! 

Crafts

We only created a few crafts this month, although there is a whole plethora of brilliant crafts that we can do with this theme. 

Muffin flower craft

This is an extremely easy craft to make, using an everyday item of 2 muffin paper cups. Little Bee used up 10 minutes one evening painting different colours on each muffin cup, and we let the paint dry overnight. We then revisited the craft the following evening when the paint had dried, and Little Bee pasted the 2 muffin cups on top of each other to give the three dimensional effect of a flower. She then drew the rest of the flower, complete with hurriedly scrawled grass at the bottom. Less than 30 minutes to create this 3D flower that can be a wonderful handmade gift for little friends or grandparents! 

Handprinted Tulips

This was a somewhat messy craft activity, possible only if the kid is not adverse to dirty painted palms. I painted Little Bee's small palm a shade of bright happy pink - her favourite colour - and got her to smear her palm 3 times on a piece of white paper....voila! We have 3 tulips! Next, I plucked a leaf from an ixora plant, let Little Bee paint it green and then stamped the leaf onto the painting. Finally, she painted 3 green stems - and there you go, handprinted tulips in less than 20 minutes! 

Tissue poppies

Some time back, we layered an abundance of wispy pink and orange tissue papers to create beautiful poppies, twining green wires around the poppies for the semblance of stems. Those flowers were bright and cheery, and I would love to make more, but it was rather labour-intensive (only I was able to cut the copious flower shapes from the thin tissue papers!)

Dried leaves collage

This craft took a relatively longer time to make - took us a whole morning to collect the entire plethora of leaves and twigs from around the estate, washing them, drying them and painstakingly sticking them to create a collage of trees. But it was such an enjoyable project that Little Bee truly relished. She was gamely selecting the leaves, washing them, helping to dry them and then meticulously pasting the leaves on the branches of the "trees". She also stuck on cotton wools as fluffy white clouds, as well as drew and coloured rolling hills as the backdrop. 

Step 1: Stick on cotton wools for clouds, draw and colour in the hills, and outline the shapes of the trees

Step 2: Stick on the twigs according to the shapes of the outlined trees in step 1. Ideal to use very strong glue, which I don't have, so I ended up using ugly scotch tape to fasten the twigs together. This step was largely done by me as sticking the tough twigs together was rather challenging for Little Bee. 

Step 3: Paste as many beautifully coloured leaves around the "trees". This was really fun and interesting for Little Bee who learned which part of a leaf should be extended from the stem. This step was done mostly by Little Bee. I took the opportunity to talk about the different colours and shapes of the leaves. 

Science

The beauty of this theme is the accessibility of plants all around us. At the start of the month, I brought the Bees around our lush estate, informing them of the month's theme, and retrieving interesting leaves and flowers along the way. We collected quite a bunch and back home, we talked about the shapes and sizes of the leaves, and how they will turn brown if we cut them off their life sources comprising of the plants' roots and stems. Little Bee was so intrigued that she was constantly persuading us to go traipsing on flower walks around the estate these days! Hence, she had been collecting bunches of flowers and putting these beautiful delicate flora into makeshift vases to decorate the house. 

The Bees also planted green bean seeds and we observed how these seeds grew on a daily basis. By explaining the growth process of these green beans, they were able to understand the different parts of a plant like root, stem, leaf, etc. I took pictures at every step of the life cycle, created flashcards from these pictures and got the Bees to arrange them in the right order of the life cycle. It was evident that Big Bee could arrange the cards with complete ease and speed, but I was surprised when Little Bee could arrange the cards in the right order with minimal supervision too! This activity reinforces their general knowledge, science education as well as Math sequencing competencies in a fun way, I thought. 

Big Bee's beanstalk

Little Bee's beanstalk

Field trip

There are field trips galore for this theme - we brought them to the Botanic Gardens, but really, every opportunity out in verdant Singapore is a field trip in itself!  

Bubbles and nature could go very well together! Inset photo: Big Bee and Eugene observing closely how the resident black swan used plants to create a cosy habitat. 

Nature all around us. On a Sunday morning trip to the wet market, we chanced upon a patch of gorgeous, gossamer dandelions! The Bees excitedly huffed, puffed and blew the seeds of the dandelions, while Hubby and I explained how plants use a lot of help from animals and humans to help pollinate themselves.