Botanical Book with wonderful art

 Today, I'm sharing this resource  TOTALLY FREE, courtesy of Botanicus.org.

Botanicus is a free, Web-based encyclopedia of digitized historic, botanical literature from the Missouri Botanical Garden Library. They have been digitizing materials from their library since 1995, focusing primarily on beautifully illustrated volumes from their rare book collection.

 Go here, scroll through the pages list on the left  and enjoy. And if you want to download the whole book in .pdf format, just press "download" at the top of the page. The individual plates then can be printed as needed.

I personally find this botanical plates quite fascinating, and even young children, with their enormous appetite for everything natural and real, are quite attracted to them.

You can browse the complete catalog here

A little more about leaves

Nothing inspires us more to do Botany studies than a nice walk through the neighborhood, on a fine Spring morning.

Today our project was very simple. Walk, take our time, stop as many times as we needed (i.e. every time we found something interesting) and come back home with a very diverse collection of leaves.

Back at home, we observed, described, identified. And we marvel at the wonderful details.


We use our window as a "back light board". The children were amazed to see all the details!

The next step: Pressing them and placing them in our folders.

Harvest time

Some 10 weeks ago we planted some beets in our backyard. Our "garden" real state is very very humble, but we decided to give it a try and see what it might yield.

Armed with a package of seed and lost of hope, we planted carefully and hoped for the best.

We finally were able to harvest our "crop" and it was so much fun!! Even our 2 year old enjoyed plucking the plants out, and helping divide root from leaves... It provided a wonderful opportunity for plant observation and gave the kids a sense of pride in their "farming" qualities :)

Later on, we turned our harvest into these three different "products":

Beet salad: steamed beets seasoned with olive oil, chopped garlic and fresh rosemary from our garden.

Beet leaves casserole: Mix raw chopped leaves with eggs and cheese, bake for 40 min, and you are done. Delicious!!


Beet juice dye: Use the leftover red water from the cooking process to dye some cotton yarn. Fun!!!

All about plants

This year we started our Botany study, and we are including the classification of leaves by shape as used in Montessori schools. We build our own Botany cards.

 

This is how to make them:

• Cut white cardstock into 18  5 x 3.5" cards (needs to be very firm, and with a non porous finishing if possible, since they are not to be laminated).

 

• Using this control chart as a guide (Once in the page click on the image to see a bigger version), cut the shape of each leaf type in green felt (the shape size should be such that leaves at least a ¼ “ margin on the card.
• Glue the shapes to the cards.
• Make 2 labels for each shape.
• Attach one label to the reverse of the card (This is going to serve as a control of error)

Work of the child

This work aims at a nomenclature acquirement, so you can basically work with the 3 period lesson with it. After that, the second set of labels can be use to identify each shape.Even though this material  cannot replace the puzzle, at least the use of felt gives it an extra tactile dimension, when compared with just simple laminated cards.

Thanks to a fellow blogger, I decided to try the "felt puzzle" for the botany cabinet. It works great, the kids loved it and it folds neatly into a small pouch I made for it. It is a great idea, it can be done in half an hour, and is especially appealing if you do not have much space in your "classroom".

I adapted mine for my 4 year old, using a basic 3-6 puzzle, but I added the flower, fruit and seeds since we have seen that before with the classification cards.

I completed the set with a hand made card as a control chart for labeling.