Winter botany block

I took this block almost exactly as it was created by Marsha Johnson in her 5th grade files, Waldorf Home Educators yahoo group.

We learned about soil, roots, bulbs, stems, branches, and evergreen trees.

Our delicious dinner of baked root vegetables.

We tried to sprout a sweet potato.  After a month it finally started to grow roots.  After 2.5 months, we still hadn't seen any sprouting.  Then my cousin told me that grocery store sweet potatoes have been treated, so they will not sprout.  Next time I do this, I plan to use a sweet potato from the store and another one from a garden or farmer's market and compare them.  

Main lesson book pages, one on stems showing short, medium and tall stems (we talked about which plants in our yard fell into which category) and another page where he drew a flowering pear branch.

The branch we forced from the pear tree in our yard.

 

And Dallin's observation and drawing of our pear tree in early winter.  He is doing a drawing and observation each season of the same tree.

We did an around-town field trip to study conifers in our city.  We took photos of the whole tree and then close-ups of individual branches as we tried to find as many different examples as possible of winter greenery.

Two shots of a pine tree.

Two shots of a Colorado Blue Spruce.

This is a yew.   We didn't know what it was when we first spotted it, but it was easy to identify once we got home and looked through our tree books.

Dwarf Alberta Spruce

I think this is a juniper or maybe a cedar.  We had a hard time deciding which, even after look through our field guides.

Creeping Oregon Grape in our yard.

Sub-Alpine Fir in our yard.  

Then Dallin did examples of the different kinds of needles in watercolor and labelled them in his main lesson book.

 This has nothing to do with botany, but our next block was introducing decimals, and I was proud of my chalkboard drawing of the Decimal Island story from the book School as a Journey, by Torin Finser.  The logger stands on the island (representing a decimal point) in the middle of the river.  Whole logs are sent to the lumber mill on the left, parts of logs are sent to the paper mill on the right.  Just like whole numbers go to the left of the decimal point and fraction numbers go on the right.