Plant Ideas & Activities

Hi everyone,

We have been learning all about plants in our class and it has been quite the adventure!

I am so proud of my students because they really have taken an interest in this topic. They have asked really good questions and are using our experiments to explore new concepts. Take a look at what we have done so far.

We started our plant unit with a few read alouds. We read about the plant life cycle, plant needs, and how to plant a seed. We learned new vocabulary words and played some sorting games to review their meanings. This was very helpful because it helped us use our new words in our writing effectively.

We worked on a few activities that paired well with our read alouds. 

This cut and paste activity was a perfect way to review the plant life cycle.

Before working on our own labeling pages, we labeled our new bulletin board together. I’m very proud of my new bulletin board, mostly because I’m not very talented when it comes to drawing! I used some clipart as inspiration and spent an a few hours drawing and cutting poster boards to make the pieces for our bulletin board. It was worth the time and effort because the look on my students’ faces the next morning was perfect and priceless!

Our first experiment was our little bean seeds. I used this awesome freebie from the fabulous Fran Kramer over at Kindergarten Crayons. The kids were so excited to have their very own greenhouse.

I decided to put a few staples under the seeds in order to keep them from falling to the bottom of the bag. I’m also hoping it will help us see the roots better. We shall see 😉

The next experiment we worked on involved food coloring and celery. My firsties were AMAZED to see the celery branches change color! It really is the perfect experiment to show kids how plants drink. I forgot to take a picture of this one but I’m sure you know what this experiment is already 😉

Finally, we did our plant observation. This activity was a hit! I knew it would be… Anything that involves magnifying glasses is really cool, isn’t it? 😉

Look at those little roots!

These emergent readers were perfect for our paired reading. I had my students fill in the missing vocabulary words with their partners. Once they filled in all the missing words, they read the book together three times. We always read books three times when we are reading with a partner. This is a perfect strategy to practice fluency. When they were done reading the book, they got to color the pictures to make the book their own!

We also worked on reading comprehension pages. I love using comprehension pages that go with the theme we are working on. It makes the story more meaningful to my students and motivates them a lot! My firsties are getting SO good at finding evidence in a text. We use a different color for each question and highlight the answer in the text. This is a skill we are still working on as a whole group, but I am hoping to see my students do this independently very soon!

I was able to use my plants unit to inspire my little writers. We brainstormed plant words together, mapped out our stories and shined through our writing!

We sorted our vocabulary words and matched them to definition cards.

We used small post-its to fill in our “are, have, can” anchor chart on our bulletin board.

We worked on some fun graphic organizers.

We even wrote AMAZING stories, using our new vocabulary words!

We worked on two projects in our interactive notebooks. One page was about plant needs and the other was about parts of a plant. We decided to hang these up on our hallway bulletin board for everyone to see and admire. We’ll stick them in our notebooks in a few weeks, when we move on to another unit 😉


Both these interactive notebook projects were lots of fun and my students worked really hard on them. I love to see my students take a project seriously because it shows me how much they are enjoying the unit we are working on. This plant unit has been a huge hit with my little learners and I plan on bringing it back next year for sure!

**You can grab both these interactive notebook pages for FREE in my TPT store. Enjoy 🙂 **

We surveyed our peers this week with a gardening question. Some students said that they have never taken care of a garden before and didn’t know if they should answer “yes” or “no”. I guess we need to explore a few gardening activities next week 😉

We also discussed the expression “having a green thumb”. The kids LOVED that expression and wanted to use it all day! One student had the courage to point out that Miss Valerie doesn’t have a green thumb… We all laughed and made it our class mission to bring our class plants back to life! HA!

Looking for a fun art project to throw in with your plant activities?
Check out this cool 3D creation we made last year!
I am saving this idea for next week 😉

This year, I decided to add a few *techy* components to my plants unit. We have been using PicCollage to show what we know. My little learners simply used to text and web search tools in the app to create collages filled with information on plants. It was exciting to see what the kids came up with! some were focused on plant needs, others described parts of a plant, and some simply filled their collage with random plant facts that stood out to them. We sent our collages to SeeSaw and shared them with our parents, too!

Lastly, I created these really fun interactive games. I love how these games turned out because their PDF format allows us to use them on a variety of devices (iPads, tablets, computers, and interactive whiteboard). We played the “true or false” game as a class on the Smart Board at the beginning of our unit. This was very helpful to me because it allowed to me to quickly find out what my students already knew about plants. Checking my students’ prior knowledge is a great way to start a unit!
The other games will be played on the class iPads with partners.
I had my little “assistant” test out the games before bringing them to school. I think he liked them! 🙂

I hope you found a few ideas that you can use for your plant unit. You can find all the activities above in my TPT shop. If you want to see what else is included in this resource, please download the preview in my shop to get a good look at what is inside.

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